


Rivers in the Desert

by starsidespica



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wild ARMs 3 Fusion, Gardens & Gardening, Gen, Gun Violence, Guns, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, goro is an elw, mentions of cannibalism, morgana is a horse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:55:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 58,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26156884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsidespica/pseuds/starsidespica
Summary: Akira Kurusu leads the Ark of Destiny's best survey team. The people of Filgaia struggle to survive, but the Ark will steer them toward prosperity--or so it's told. Akira has yet to see the fruit of his labors put food on anyone's table, and the planet withers and dies a bit more with each passing day.Then he stumbles upon a secret garden, kept by an even more secretive boy, and the gears of fate begin to turn.
Kudos: 5





	1. The Hermit

Sand pinged off the sides of the ship. Akira imagined it was what rain sounded like—when it landed instead of drying up in the air above the desert surface, leaving only the memory of it behind, like a hallucination, or a fever dream. Akira had plenty of experience with both; bad food did that to anyone, much less the child he’d been before his parents left him at the Ark’s door.

Left him and gone, as if they couldn’t be bothered to shoulder the responsibility anymore. Akira suspected it was the food bills, even though he’d contributed as much as he could—his earliest memory was still of raking over the straw in some barn in some small town for a handful of gella, his hands far too small to hold the pitchfork properly.

It could have been worse, but it still stung. They were his parents. They were supposed to care.

Oracle sniffed over the comms.

“You alright?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, as glum as she always was when the sands picked up into storms. No matter how much time passed, her mother’s death still haunted her, and she still cried when so much as a passing breeze flew a few grains into her goggles. “Just, you know, tired. I’m almost done plotting a course back to the Ark. Queen’ll just have to follow it in the morning. But…”

If it was just the sandstorm, she would sound a bit more distraught—every granule hitting the ship would be one that scoured the flesh from her mother’s bones, and Oracle would never forget the bloody sight of it—but there was a hint of something other than that ingrained fear bothering her. “What is it?” he prodded.

She was quiet for a while. Fox, his lanky frame too long for any of the bunk beds piled in the cabin, turned in his sleep, grunting as the nose of his mask pressed into the floor. If Akira looked back he would see the other boy cradling his katana like a blanket, running his gloved hands over the fraying tassel swinging from the hilt.

Not that Akira would blame him: Noir kept the blade of her ax almost dangerously close to her face, lips nearly kissing the edge; Queen had woken herself up one too many times by hitting herself with her own brass knuckles; Panther had the habit of tossing and turning until her whip was tangled about her and falling even more deeply asleep the tighter it became. Skull was the only practical one, rigging his spiked club to the bottom of the bunk on top of his; one tug and it would come free. Akira had seen him do it and let it slide despite the others’ concerns.

They hurt themselves enough keeping their weapons at hand at every hour. All Akira ever asked was for one person to not wake up with cuts or scrapes or with an arm turned an alarming shade of purple. Just one.

“Well, it’s just…” Oracle finally said as the sand surged with a renewed aggression over the ship. She yelped, bit her tongue, and stewed over the hurt.

Akira chuckled, hands still firmly on his dagger. He turned it over, scanning for any new nicks in the blade, and found none.

“Don’t be a jerk,” she muttered. “Anyway, I just… I was scanning the area, looking for new monster nests that might have popped up nearby since last time, and I found something.”

“Something? You don’t know if it’s a nest?”

“It doesn’t look like a nest!” she defended. Images popped up on his goggles: comparisons of the cliffs on either side of the ship, the great jut of a worn-down mountain on the Baskar’s side of the canal. There was something odd about the second image, something dark at the tip, grainy in the storm.

“I took those to mark down the erosion status of the canal, and that thing was there,” she said. “It doesn’t _look_ like a nest. I don’t think it’s even possible for one to pop up this quickly. Gobs could do it, but they like living in abandoned places near settlements, and the last we saw—”

“That was just the tip of some mountain,” he finished, raking over the grains of the photo. “A few dead trees and some rocks.”

“But there’s been no reason for us to really check it out,” Oracle said. “Maybe it’s some Baskar retreat, but if it was they should have mentioned it to us by now, right?”

“You want to go check it out.”

“We won’t know what’s there until we do.”

He knew what she was thinking: that the Baskars had some secret garden, one that the Ark had yet to touch. It was the only way to explain some of the food they traded with: sweet carrots and bitter tubers, far larger than the ones grown in any of the Ark’s sites, even the Baskar’s own; berries, their color darkening the fatter they got until Akira could feel the juice dripping down his chin as he bit into them; the sheer beauty of the revive fruits, hoarded like the last bit of precious water in the town’s well and far more expensive; the flowers that the girls had cooed over until they saw the price tags.

A wandering trader brought them in, the Baskars always said, but it never explained how fresh they looked, as if they’d just been picked yesterday. The flowers wouldn’t be able to survive very long in the harsh desert heat without wilting, and yet their colors were vibrant, their petals strong.

And now he was thinking it, too: a Baskar secret garden, producing better fruit than the Ark. The soil would have to be rich and moist, and the plants regularly watered to grow to such sizes, which meant they had to have a secret water cache, too. An underground lake, for example; something that could fit, say, inside a mountain where anyone that passed by only saw the rocks and the trees.

It was a shame. Something like that should have been the first thing the Baskars shared with them, and instead they’d hidden it, and now Akira had to go and find out if all of the Ark’s deals with them were too lopsided to continue. Shido wouldn’t stand for it, not when they had the knowledge to keep the rest of the population from starving to death and didn’t share it.

What the Ark could be doing with that technology… The towns and settlements that would never have to depend on the Ark for rations ever again… Akira could barely imagine it.

His knife turned over, glinting as it caught the emergency lights. Beneath his mask, Akira’s grin was as sharp as the blade he handled.

Finally, he thought. Freedom was in sight.

* * *

In the morning he left instructions with Oracle for the team to head back to the Ark, despite her protests that checking out the mystery site was safer as a group. If the Baskars really did have a secret garden, security would be tight—all the roaming monsters, while not particularly strong around the Colony, would still be enough to warrant a few guards with ARMs or their strange, arcane magic—and they would take one lonely wanderer with a much more relaxed stance than a fully armed, Ark-outfitted group.

Oracle had relented in the end. If he wasn’t back by next week, she was to tell the team about the site. If he did return and it turned out to be nothing, then it was better for just the two of them to know.

He took the sandskimmer at first light, Oracle watching him bleary-eyed through the ship’s cameras. The sandstorm was long over, and yet chunks of rock still fell from the cliffs, landing in the sea of sand with a soft noise almost like an exhale: just a puff of air and then it was over, gone, swallowed up by the deceptive looseness of the grains. A pod of sandfish roamed over the northern horizon; he kept a nervous eye on it until the ship was out of sight, hugging the curves of the Baskar cliffs until the skimmer hit the more densely-packed sand of a beach.

One camo-tarp covering his beached skimmer later, Akira double-checked the coordinates of the garden. He set his display to show him the route Oracle had meticulously plotted out, hauled his supplies onto his back, and set out.

It took two days to get there. Two days of catching sleep wherever he could, of eating on his feet, of sucking up every drop of moisture his suit could reclaim for him, of backtracking when he realized he took a wrong turn, of watching packs of monsters on the prowl that eyed him with wary, hungry interest until they scented the drying blood of their kin on his boots.

(Fox would click his tongue at the bodies Akira left lying in his wake. The meat was gamy and tasteless, far too tough to actually enjoy, and the rest of the beasts would be of value to someone. Doctor Takemi had taken to asking for monster parts to study for her medicines; Fox’s old mentor Madarame had shown him several ways to get various dyes and paints out of the organs.)

With his team at his side Akira would have stopped to collect each one, but he was one person in the unforgiving desert, and the dead beasts eventually filled their brethren’s bellies once his footsteps were erased by the desert winds.

But he managed to make it there, up the slight incline of the mountain, past the dead trees and scrub brush that populated too much of the planet. Years and years ago, eons upon eons, before humans had ever settled there, _maybe_ it had been lush and green. Maybe the sea of sand had been an ocean of water, and these scraggly, broken things clinging to nothing except the equally-dead soil had been a forest.

Like always, he tried to imagine it. Like always, he failed.

The desert and the empty sea of sand was all he knew. All those pictures in the Ark’s archives, of a verdant green planet? Akira didn’t know it, and he never would.

But, maybe… With a secret garden…

He shook his head. He was placing too many hopes into the existence of it; the Baskars weren’t so cruel as to hide away half of their crops if it meant leaving everyone else to starve. What they had shown him had to be all they had, but now he was here, with another two day hike back to the sandskimmer.

He had to trust that the Baskars weren’t hiding anything from them, but…

That was hard, with evidence to the contrary almost staring him in the face. All he had to do was find it.

He continued up the mountain, through an oddly linear gap in the trees. There were no rare desert lizards scampering through the shade, and he couldn’t find any trace of dung heaps, whether fresh or dry. This clearly wasn’t the kind of place the monsters frequented—Akira found himself scanning the treeline for snipers, sure that in between one footstep and the next he would be killed—but it wasn’t so uninhabited that the animals were settling back in.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe there was no water cache here, and no garden to feed it.

But the fruit, easily as big as his hand… The potatoes and ginger… The flowers…

It had to be coming from somewhere.

He shook his head again. Realized at some point the linear gap in the trees had become a path, not oft-traversed but still there in a minor dip at the sides of his boots. Someone lived up here, then.

A traveler, the Baskars had always said. Young, maybe, protected by an old suit that was more patchwork than technologically sound, trading for the occasional bits of cloth and flour. He tended to ask for tubing or pipes, which was where the Ark had first started their deal with the Baskars—let the Ark test their new fertilizers and soil compounds on Baskar lands, and they could have all the pipes and tubing they could ever dream of. Akira had thought it strange that the Baskars asked for items they never used, but if they weren’t for them…

He thought of the Ark’s greenhouses, and the sprinkler systems, and the pipework that fed them. Miles upon miles of pipelines and pumps to bring water up out of caverns so deep underground Akira could only dream of ever seeing them.

Then he thought of turning on his mask’s cameras—Oracle would be beside herself if she couldn’t get footage—but just knowing that the Ark would collect every scrap of evidence first sent a chill down his spine. Masayoshi Shido was doing his best to lead the Ark into a new era, one without starvation and drought. He would rip this mountain apart to get at its secrets if he caught so much as a whiff of what was going on; the traveler would never stand a chance against the Ark’s superior weaponry.

Akira clenched his fists against the vision and continued on. Dead trees and blue sky and the thin column of smoke from a Baskar’s cook fire, miles and miles away. Scrub brush and his boots hitting the ground and the trickle of sand as a breeze pushed a collection of it over the side of some rock or other. Every time he swallowed his own spit the suit made a low creaking noise, or maybe that was his hands, fingers itching for the trigger of his ARM and the hilt of his dagger.

So when he rounded the bend of the path and found a gate blocking his path, he stopped short. The fence around it sat waist-high, set with rusted barbed wire that would tear straight through the material of his suit. There were no traps, otherwise.

Just a gate, its hinges creaking as Akira pushed it open, and beyond it a clear area ringed with cliffs. Dry, brittle grass crunched beneath his boots; clumps of it still clung stubbornly to life, more brown than green, in the shade of a small, worn down farmhouse. Most of the paint had peeled off, and the remnants of a porch were piled by the door. Akira didn’t dare to test the windows, knowing the panes would be too warped to see through—or maybe they wouldn’t be, and he would find the traveler staring back at him from some plush living room, a rifle-type ARM like Fox’s spread across his lap as he enjoyed tea.

Evidence. That was all Akira needed.

But why should he do it the hard way?

“Hello?” he called out, listening to the way his mask-amplified voice bounced off the walls of the cliffs. The polite thing to do would be to knock on the door, but Akira wanted space between himself and that imagined ARM. He waited, thinking of the glint of a barrel in the shine of the sun on the windows; he kept his hands by his side, loose and twitching, ready to duck and fire.

Nothing. Not even a creak from the farm house’s ancient weather vane.

“Hello?” he called again. He dared a step after another slow minute of silence, then another—then dashed over to the cliffs, letting Oracle’s detection software filter over the area. No obvious trapdoors, no infrared lasers, not even a tamed monster to act as an attack dog.

Sloppy, he thought—but then again, if no one ever came up here, there wouldn’t be much use in security measures. A barbed wire fence was usually enough to deter passerby, but up here? On top of a mountain that he’d only had access to via the sandsea?

Sloppy. Or, at the very least, discordant. Why have the fence but nothing else? Why have the fence at all?

Akira reached the cliffs. They towered over him, blotting out the sun, taking the heat with it. His suit, meant to keep him cool in the harsh desert days, audibly clicked as it set itself into night mode. The chill that crept over his skin gradually warmed as he scanned the cliff face.

A hidden garden, he thought, giddiness pooling in his stomach. Something even the Ark hadn’t been able to touch, hadn’t been able to ruin with its monster-meat fertilizers and chemically-enhanced soil.

“Please,” he found himself saying, raking his hands over the rocks. No identifiable traps, but no hidden doors releasing drafts, either; the temperature reading on his suit stayed at a maddening sixty degrees.

“Please,” he begged, looking over his shoulder to the farm house, still empty. To the clearing, still silent. His hands shook as he got back to work, flipping through Oracle’s dozen trap-finding softwares until a chance look at the ground showed him footprints.

Footprints, not his, leading right up to the cliff and disappearing inside.

Akira rushed over, blindly attacked the wall for a few minutes, and all but jumped in relief as a door slid open into an airlock, sand scattered over the floor. The door slid shut behind him with a near-silent hiss; he wrenched open the other door, bracing himself.

It still wasn’t enough.

Greenery dripped from the ceiling and sprouted from the earth. Leaves wet with mist brushed his suit, the wicking fibers sucking it up greedily. His suit, sensing the humidity, flashed warnings Akira had never seen before; he shut them down with a grunt. No, he wasn’t dying; no, there was no need to ping the Ark for rescue. Yes, he was aware of his rapid heartbeat and the shaking in his hands.

How could he _not_ be, when there was food in front of him? When those same fat berries he loved so much were staring him in the face, a little greener, a little unripe for the plucking, but _there_.

He swallowed, his throat as dry as the desert outside. Mist sprayed him in the face; his fingers, suddenly clumsy, worked at getting his mask off. He wanted to feel it—water, on his bare skin, the kind of luxury not even the Ark could afford its most elite members—and it was cold, and a bit jarring, and he huffed a laugh as it ran in his eyes without the sting of sand.

Water. A greenhouse. The Ark would be livid; Akira could see Shido’s face now, twisted into fury upon learning that someone kept a garden as wondrous as this. He’d be pissed he didn’t get to profit off of it.

And Akira was too, beneath all the awe. Someone was living like this, when there were settlements struggling even with the Ark’s help. Someone was growing enough food to feed two or three people comfortably, when there were children starving to death. Someone was lavishing these plants with water, when even the reclamation facilities were starting to go dry. It made him want to scream.

Instead, he shrugged his mask back on, shivered at the feel of the mist caught under it, and dropped to his knees.

The soil was dark, nearly black, and so wet it clung to his gloves. It was softer than the Ark’s, loamy and rich. He could practically smell it, even through the mask, and it didn’t crumble to pieces in his hands. The roots were thick and strong when he pulled back dirt to examine them; no hint of disease or rot or the water sacs the Ark had spliced onto seeds.

Not Ark soil, not Ark seeds—had someone really grown all of this on his own? Had they managed to do what the Ark couldn’t? Could it be replicated?

Akira patted the soil back into place and rocked back on his heels. Water traveled down his hand when he touched it to a cluster of berries; it streaked through the dirt still clinging to his gloves.

It reflected… white?

Akira turned, taking in the sun-bleached clothes and bright-red half-mask and the tufts of sandy-brown hair of the traveler. The pruning shears caught his eye last, and he raised his hands, away from his weapons and the soil.

“I can explain,” he said, like a child caught rummaging through bare cupboards in the night.

“I’m sure you can,” said the traveler.

* * *

They left the greenhouse. Akira tried not to stare back at the hidden door, clearly visible through the windows of the farm house. The traveler kept his shears on him, even as he plopped onto a threadbare couch. He did not offer Akira a seat at the armchair, equally threadbare and faded from the sun streaming in through the window.

Akira tossed his weapons belt on the low table. The traveler stared at it.

After a few more seconds of hesitation, Akira tossed his mask on the pile, too.

The traveler stared at him then, tapping away at his shears.

He shouldn’t mention the Ark. No one really enjoyed owing a man like Shido their lives, and this one had gone out of his way to stay as hidden as possible. He wouldn’t like it if Akira brought it up. Akira certainly wouldn’t.

It was the traveler who spoke first. “You noticed the camouflage came undone, I assume.”

“Part of it,” Akira said. “I never noticed anything up here before then. I was interested and came to check it out.”

“My fault,” the traveler said to himself. “But… not really. The camouflage has always been there; it was only a matter of time before it came loose. But I should have checked it more. I should do that from now on. And what, then, should I do about you?”

It took Akira a moment to realize the question was for him. “I’m not sure. It was… a very lovely garden. Beautiful, actually.”

“As it should be,” was the response. “It is my mother, after all.”

Ah, Akira thought. “I hope losing her wasn’t too painful for you.”

“Not quite as painful as watching some stranger shove his hands into her bones, no,” the traveler said.

“Forgiveness is all I can ask for.”

The traveler grunted. His hand still tapped at his shears; he refused to look anywhere but the pile on his table, the belt shedding sand, the decals of Akira’s mask, bone-white except for rings around the eyes, like lashes. At length, he said, “And you don’t know who I am, do you.”

What kind of question was that? “I know you’re someone with a beautiful garden.”

“And I know you’re someone with far too much curiosity for your own good.”

Akira shrugged. “The world’s a bit too mundane for me to dare to ignore something as exciting as this.”

“Yes,” the traveler drawled, “I suppose running about shooting at monsters to make a living is far too mundane. Do Drifters usually creep onto other people’s properties without any regard for its inhabitants?”

 _Do you sneak and steal and kill_ was the question. Akira never thought of his parents as being capable of murder, much less theft, but he’d also thought they’d never abandon him. He had to wonder if they were bones in someone’s garden, too. Oracle’s mother certainly wasn’t.

“I knocked,” Akira lied. “Nobody answered. Pretty reasonable of me to think the place was abandoned, right?”

“Except you said you came because of the camouflage malfunction.”

“Yeah, and then I saw the house and knocked like any decent person would.”

The traveler snorted. “I’m sure you did. That’s why you were poking about in my garden.”

Shit, he had to back-pedal, fast. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t come here to steal from you, or to kill you and then steal from you. I came because it looked interesting, and a single farmhouse with no discernible food source nearby would have to have some kind of garden somewhere, and there are plenty of dungeons with mechanisms like hidden doors and things like that—”

“Don’t lie,” the traveler said, sounding as if he wanted to add bite to it but was too tired—or too wary—to. “You were looking at the soil. I watched you. No one would do something like that unless they were trained to, and those idiots out there with their tiny settlements and meager crops are too busy looking at the fruits to look at the dirt it grows on. Don’t _lie_.”

“So I’m trained to,” Akira said, fingers twitching. “So what?”

“Who taught you to?”

Noir, with her bright smile as she patted the latest soil composition into place, wishing that this one would be the one to end suffering around the world. Noir, crying as yet another batch of crops failed to take after that first year. Everything they grew sucked up nutrients like a sponge, leaving the soil high and dry. She’d tried just about everything short of growing crops on top of a still-warm corpse. None of it worked.

“A friend,” he decided on. “She’s—she wants to help people, to end the food shortage. She’s working hard. What you’ve made isn’t anything like what she has.”

“Because you’re all fools, directing your prayers to the wrong places.”

“Are we?”

But the conversation was over: the traveler nudged at his belt and mask, and Akira took them, sliding them back on with whispers that were too loud in the silent room.

“I’ll come back,” he told the traveler, before slipping his mask on. “Your mother—the garden, it’s beautiful, but it’s lonely. I don’t think she’d want you to be by yourself like this, all the time.”

“Don’t bother,” the traveler said. “I have all the company I need.”

“Plants are nice, but they aren’t much company.”

“I’m afraid I don’t much need the company of a busybody Drifter.”

Akira shrugged. “What a shame. You’re getting it.”

* * *

Futaba gaped. Akira shoved another mouthful of not-rice into his mouth and chewed, trying hard not to focus on how it stuck to his teeth, determined to find a new home. The vat-grown food the Ark made was still tricky, and so the ones left to test it were the ones who lived there.

Akira wanted to complain that the Ark wasn’t his home, not _really_ , but it housed and fed him almost for free, and all he had to do to earn his keep was travel and bring dirt back.

“But— _nothing_? You’re sure?”

“Yep, I’m sure,” he said, through his mouthful. He scraped at a stuck grain with his tongue. “I’d have to take some rappelling equipment if you want me to look again. There wasn’t any kind of path around that side of the mountain. Sorry, Futaba.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, leaning back. “I’m just—it looked like something. I know it did. But—but maybe it was just a shadow, or some sand on the camera lens.”

“Well, now we know it’s nothing. No need to worry over it. Everyone makes mistakes.”

“Except this one could have gotten you killed.”

That was true, no matter how much he wanted to deny it. Drifters courted danger; it was just what they did, fighting monsters and taking out Gob infestations and dying all alone, out there in the desert wasteland. The hours he’d spent on the sandskimmer didn’t make her feel any better; anything that could survive in the sandsea was strong enough to rip a tiny machine like that to pieces without even trying.

After the monotony of the mountain, it had been nerve-wracking to be around so many monsters again, to feel the dust of the desert seep back into his pores, even through the suit. He’d been tempted to turn around and live in that traveler’s garden for the rest of his life.

But he had friends. Family. A boss that would likely torture the information on his whereabouts out of Futaba and then send the entirety of the Ark’s forces down on the mountain, reasoning and logic be damned, because _no one_ turned their back on Masayoshi Shido or his glorious Ark.

And that traveler only had the garden, the last remnants of his mother in every grain of dirt.

Akira wondered if it hurt. It probably had. It had to have.

He smiled at Futaba, patted her head just the way her mother always used to, and said, “Well, it didn’t. You’re still stuck with me. How’d the boss take my little detour?”

Futaba grumbled. “I told him you left something in Baskar Colony and went back to fetch it. You’d better find something irreplaceable before he calls you.”

“If he remembers to.”

“Yeah, if.”

She still looked downcast. Akira was about to say something else, but Sojiro came through the door, pushing a cart of new foodstuffs in with one hand. Half of his fingers were missing on the other, along with part of his palm, and when he waved it looked as if a crescent moon was hooked onto the end of his arm.

Futaba hurled herself off her stool, manhandled the cart away from him as best she could, and marched it into the pantry.

Sojiro stared after her, squinty-eyed from too many years out in the desert without proper mask tech to filter out the worst of it. He pawed at his face with his mangled hand. “I’m perfectly capable of pushing a cart,” he said.

“No, you’re not!” Futaba argued from inside the pantry.

“I can cook, but I can’t push a cart?” Sojiro asked Akira.

Akira nodded, still pushing at that stubborn grain. He was considering using his chopsticks like toothpicks the longer it held on. “You’re infirm, old man,” he said, and didn’t bother to dodge the light slap that earned him. Better him than Futaba. Better him than anyone else.

He knew it was all good fun—Sojiro never meant it, and Akira was usually a cocky brat, having never grown out of his penchant for attention-seeking disguised as trouble-making—but the others… sometimes he thought they’d be fine, and sometimes during storm duty with Futaba he’d have to listen to them whimper in their sleep over hits and slaps. Ann and Haru were the worst of the bunch; Akira was glad that the deal with New Little Rock’s Sugimura family had fallen through, and that Kamoshida had been maimed by a particularly tenacious Hobgob while out on a ‘regular’ scouting mission—

(If one could call being hauled around to the arena and back for some quick cash a scouting mission, and if one could call it lucky that he’d only survived because he’d sacrificed the rest of the team, spent from their time fighting in the ring, to do so…)

—if only because it meant that neither of the girls had to deal with personal problems anymore. That was the lie they always fed him, anyway: it was a personal problem, and it wouldn’t affect their teamwork. They may as well have told him when the weddings were.

“And you’re a cheeky brat,” Sojiro said, rounding the counter. “So, how is it? Like the new rice?”

“It’s trying to use my mouth as a new breeding vat, so, uh, no,” he said, sure that this damn grain of rice wasn’t just wriggling but multiplying as he worked to pry it loose. He gave up considering and scraped it off with a finger, and showed Sojiro the wriggling mess.

It looked like a maggot, white and bloated and just—squirming, as if it wanted to burrow into his hand. Sojiro plucked it off with a piece of scrap cloth, folded it up neat, and set it into the incinerator bin. “Bad batch,” he muttered to himself.

“Don’t need to tell me that,” Akira said, staring at the rest of his rice. It didn’t seem to be wriggling, and he was too hungry to care—he shoved more in his mouth, waiting for the telltale wriggle.

Sojiro sighed, muttering about how he’d let the vat techs know. He let Akira eat in peace, and then do his dishes in peace—Futaba was taking her sweet time unloading the cart in the pantry, probably working out whatever nerves he’d hit with his stupid dash into the desert wasteland over a grain of sand on a camera lens—while working at an ancient crossword puzzle book thicker than Akira’s arm. The just as ancient pencil had been sharpened down to a nub over the years, and graphite dusted the back of Sojiro’s still-whole hand.

As Akira moved to leave, Sojiro said, “I hope you know just how upset Futaba is.”

Akira didn’t. The only people he’d loved and cared for had abandoned him at the Ark in the middle of the night. He’d gone to sleep wondering where they would go next once morning came, and woke up to learn that they had gone on without him, and good riddance for their measly pocketbooks, too. If they’d been flayed alive in a sandstorm or turned into roasts over a Gob’s fire, he’d never know.

But Futaba did, and all the promises in the world to come back to her would never assuage that little voice in her head that said he would die and die alone, overrun by the vicious monsters that roamed the land or overwhelmed by the environment itself. That traveler could have killed him with his pruning shears, sneaked up behind him and got a good whack in until his head was a pulpy mess of skull and brain tissue, snipped half his throat open and severed his spine for good measure—

And Futaba wouldn’t have known. None of them would have.

There was nothing Akira could do to make it better, though. Their dear friend’s life—their leader’s life—should have been worth more than the thrill of hunting down the unknown.

… And yet he’d gone out and done it, and was already planning on going out and doing it again. Maybe this time the traveler would let him touch the soil with his bare hands—would it be springy, as he imagined it? Would he be able to shape it like clay?—and he would return with the scent of it on his hands, fine and indescribable from the gunpowder of his ARM, he was sure of it.

Yes, he would go back. Yes, he would annoy the hell out of that traveler for the chance to see that garden again—to imagine the possibilities, the lives he could save. And yes, he would worry his teammates, his friends, his family, left here in the Ark.

He had to go; he had no choice. It was in his blood to.

“I’ll find some way to make it up to her,” he said, and fled the room.

* * *

So it went: Akira and his team would be sent out on a survey mission. They would collect their jars of dirt and trimmed leaves and withered stalks and roots, slaughter a band or two or five of monsters roaming too close to whatever town they were in, exterminate packs of Gobs and liberate stolen belongings, and head back to Baskar Colony for some rest before they returned to the Ark. Akira and his team still drooled over the traveler’s wares, all pricey enough to cost a small fortune, and Akira slowly but surely worked out a shorter land path from the colony to the traveler’s mountain, occasionally forcing the team to leave without him.

He’d gotten slightly lost before. No wonder it had taken so long, but now the problem was the crevasse that separated the mountain from the rest of the continent.

It was no wonder Queen cornered him late one night, as he prepared to head off again, one of the colony’s stocky horses pulling at the reins he’d slipped over its head. The thing had to be one of the last of its kind—feeding a horse was no easy task, much like feeding a child—and it stomped its hooves, dancing at the promise of a few days of freedom. Maybe a lifetime, if a wayward monster decided it wanted to try horse meat.

And it was no wonder his excuse of a shy paramour wasn’t quite believed. Queen had a way of staring into your very soul until all your crimes spilled from your mouth of their own volition, and as she fixed him with that hard, steely gaze he wondered what she found there.

Rot and dust, most likely. He was a child of the desert and nothing would ever change that.

“Will you be back in time for our departure?” she asked, shifting her attention to the horse.

“Yeah,” he said. His team was supposed to help with the weeding as they collected their samples, and with a colony as big as the Baskar’s it was bound to take a while. Skull would loudly complain about his leader’s absence the whole time he was dumping weeds into the Ark’s collection bins. “Tell them I’m sorry?”

She looked at him again, red eyes gone bloody in a shaft of moonlight. “You must really be in love to abandon your duty like this.”

Akira shrugged. That was one way to put it. “I’m coming back. It’s not quite abandonment.”

“Skirting the law like that might get you killed one day, you know,” she said, and sighed. “Fine. I’ll tell them something came up that needed your attention, but you’ll owe me, understand?”

“I won’t give you details.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” she said. “I’ll let you know when I think of something.”

“Sure,” he promised, already hoping it wasn’t something outlandish. Knowing Queen it wouldn’t be, but if she really wanted to put the hurt on him…

She watched him saddle up and ride off, and he could taste the dust of the trail on the back of his tongue, air filters be damned.

The traveler wasn’t happy to see him. His half-mask, donned hastily, let the twist of his mouth show—naturally Akira wasn’t welcome, but the horse was out of the question, even if it was pulling up the few scraggly weeds by the farmhouse.

“I can’t believe this,” the traveler said, more to himself than to Akira.

Understandable. It must get lonely out here, with no one to talk to but the bones in the dirt. Akira still replied, “I did tell you I’d be back.”

“And _I_ told you I didn’t want your company.”

“What a shame,” Akira said. “I want yours.”

“You want my garden,” was the hissed response.

“The garden’s nice too. Very nice. If you don’t mind—”

“I do,” the traveler said, and slammed the door in Akira’s face.

Well. Akira knew exactly what to do with that.

* * *

He visited more often. The traveler never felt like conversing, which was a shame, because Akira had never had to carry a conversation by himself before, and often by the time he returned to the colony his voice was hoarse. Skull’s brain took a leap of logic; he made a passing comment about it being _just that good, man, seriously?_ and grinned all the while, eyes crinkling behind his mask. Fox didn’t get the joke or didn’t care, too busy sketching the same scenery for the dozenth time.

The girls were disappointed, but hid it well.

Good for them, he thought as he left the shipyard. At least Sojiro would stop giving him well-meaning looks over the cafeteria counter now; every piece of gossip started in the cafeteria. Sojiro knew everything before everyone.

But maybe that wasn’t a good thing.

“Visiting Nishima?” Futaba asked, crouched against the wall.

He jumped, one hand going for the knife at his belt that wasn’t there. Shido never allowed anyone to walk around armed on the Ark after the assassination of a previous Ark leader; Akira figured it was a good thing, otherwise Futaba would be on her way to seeing her mother again for good.

“Yeah,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“For what?”

He shrugged. Makoto was one thing, but he’d already told Futaba he wasn’t going back to the mountain, and—

She gaped at him. “You jerk!” she cried, shooting to her feet. “Don’t tell me you’ve been going— _there_!”

“No idea what you mean,” he said.

“Bull!” She stomped her foot. Sixteen she was not. Akira had been much better behaved at six. “You told me there was nothing there! Zip, zero, nada, and now you’re sneaking off every time we visit the colony, _and_ you’re visiting Nishima? I thought you hated that guy!”

“Yuuki has a vast amount of talent that I admire,” Akira said. Yuuki had also talked his ear off every moment they spent together for the short time they were dating. It turned out to be nerves, but Akira hadn’t known that back then, and Yuuki’s willingness to somehow make up for wasting Akira’s time was… kind of disturbing, actually. Kamoshida had done a number on him before his nervous breakdown had him reassigned to Iwai’s shipyard.

“He’s making you rappelling equipment, isn’t he.”

He shrugged and turned down the hall. It would be just his luck for Yuuki to hear enough of the conversation to get the _Akira hates him_ part.

Akira didn’t, really. Yuuki had his charms, but Akira wasn’t quite ready to be his therapist, and it had taken them only three months to find out that Yuuki wasn’t quite ready for any kind of relationship.

Kamoshida was lucky he’d been demoted to vat duty. Akira would have made sure the Hobgob finished him off next time.

“He’s designing it,” Akira said, once they were far enough away. “Iwai’s building it.”

“Same difference,” Futaba muttered. “But that’s not the point! You lied!”

He ducked them into an old storage room left to collect dust. Hifumi had loved to show him all the little hideaways in the camera’s blind spots, and he didn’t want to risk one of those cameras having those microphone additions she’d hinted at.

“That’s what I’d do,” she’d said, tossing her hair over her shoulder and giving him a shy yet coy smile. She’d been Yuuki’s exact opposite in so many ways—until she got fed up with Akira’s non-committal lifestyle. It was her or his team, and…

And he hadn’t wanted to be her therapist, either. Doctor Maruki was plenty good enough.

Though where Hifumi had played the part of a queen well enough, Futaba fidgeted, a common girl in a dusty royal court. She couldn’t decide between planting her hands on her hips and crossing her arms, and kept switching between both as he thought of the best way to handle this.

The truth was always best. Even if it hurt him to part with that lovely garden.

“Futaba,” he said, and waited until she jerked her head, listening. “You know I’m sorry. You—you should know that first. But I didn’t want to take the chance of Shido learning about it before I knew what I wanted to do with it. It’s—it’s a beautiful garden, and we both know what he’d do with it.”

“Boot Hill,” she muttered, and shivered.

He nodded. Boot Hill had had one of the planet’s most successful crop yields for decades. The second Shido took power he ripped the whole field apart, trying to find out why and coming up with nothing. The field had never recovered; Boot Hill’s few residents had moved to wherever would take them or turned to Drifting to make a decent living.

“There’s a boy there,” Akira told her, against his better judgment. “He tends that garden all by himself. It’s all he has. If we take it from him, if I force myself in there, we lose the chance to learn why it’s such a beautiful garden and what sets it apart from everywhere else. Understand?”

Futaba, who had been to as many field-burials as he had, who hadn’t had even a single tooth or piece of hair of her own mother to bury, nodded after a while.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” she said, still sounding pissed, though it was tinged with enough sadness that he could tell she was seeing it again: her mother, scoured alive by the sands. “It’s just—you lied. You promised you wouldn’t. We’re family, and that means not lying to each other.”

It didn’t, he thought. His own parents had lied to him plenty of times, the ‘short stay’ at the Ark included. But he said, “Yeah, family. …You know I didn’t mean to lie, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, blinking rapidly. “Yeah, you told me. I heard you.”

He waited. Futaba crouched on the floor, hugged her knees, and let her head rest as she thought, and processed, and came to all of the conclusions he had since first stepping off the sandskimmer: that Akira could either turn the garden’s secrets over to Shido and the Ark of Destiny, entrusting that the knowledge would make its way across the world for the betterment of its few and scattered people—

(Which wasn’t likely. Shido rubbed Akira the wrong way; he rubbed everyone the wrong way. The only reason he had his position was because he had a way with words, and enough clout to shove everyone else out of the way, and enough smarts in his head to plan effectively. Shido would never share the garden’s secrets, not without hefty tolls and homages made in his name, and anyone who didn’t like it could starve.)

—or he could go rogue, scattering bits of wisdom in his wake, entrusting his safety to the men and women he came across. Food for freedom. His safety for their lives.

“I haven’t picked yet,” he told Futaba as she looked at him, blinking back more tears then shoving her glasses out of the way when she couldn’t hold them back. He dug out a handkerchief and gave it to her.

She took it but shook her head, and when she moved to flee the room he stepped aside to let her.

She knew, the same way he knew: he was not a child of the Ark, not a servant of Destiny. The wide open wasteland sang in every fiber of his being, and he was happiest under that bright blue sky. Right now he was caught like a bird in a cage, but one day he would be free, and even a man like Masayoshi Shido wouldn’t be able to catch him.

She knew, and it hurt her. She thought that he’d always be around, the same way the others were going to be, parentless (for the most part) and without any other family to call their own, no one to take them in and care for them, no one to visit while they made their rounds. Futaba’s world was the Ark, and the planet was just a backdrop for it. Just a prop. Flavor text in those games she liked to play so much.

And Akira hated it.

* * *

The traveler gave him a long, apprising, withering look. Morgana—as Akira had dubbed the horse, his white socks brown with dust from the trail—flicked his tail and tossed his head. There were no more stubborn weeds for him to eat, and the last hay-pellet Akira had won off of some shmuck over in Claiborne had been consumed yesterday.

Finally, the traveler scowled. “Fine,” he spat.

“I can pay you,” Akira reminded him; they stormed to the garden side by side.

“Triple, then,” the traveler said, and the hidden door shut in Akira’s face as he stopped dead in his tracks, stunned. Triple a hay-pellet? If it was fresh greens it would be worth five—no, ten times as much.

… Maybe the traveler wasn’t as well-traveled as he had thought. Or maybe he simply didn’t need the money; flour only lasted so long, after all. Or maybe he didn’t want the money; the Baskars had mentioned trading when he had no coin to spend. Where would he even keep it all?

Certainly not in a pouch in his pack, bulging with small coins the monsters dropped. They had taken to eating anything shiny they came across, assuming it was wet, and the metal tended to make them sick. Akira wasn’t complaining. It made them easier to hunt.

The traveler came back out, a box of pruned leaves in his hands. There were unripe fruits mixed in there, and branches, and the pale yellow bud of a flower. He shoved it in Akira’s arms and stalked back to his house, brushing hair out of his face.

“Hey,” Akira called, “what about the—”

“See if your beast eats it first,” was the response before the door slammed closed behind him.

Morgana nosed his way into the box, already crunching away. Akira held still and kept the box up—there was no way that huge head could reach the box if he put it on the ground—and wound up splashed with juice. The horse even ate the twigs, then lapped up the sides of the box, looking for more.

“Sorry, boy, that’s it,” Akira said, and patted his muzzle.

Morgana stared at him sadly, as if saying _What do you mean that’s it?_ but eventually wandered back over to the shady spot on his own.

There was nowhere in particular to put the box, so Akira set it beside the pile of lumber, and dug his coin pouch out. He counted out gella as he entered the house, boots thudding over creaking floorboards. There was a crash from the kitchen, a loud curse, the sound of something light but no less solid hitting the wall—his half-mask, probably, with its absurdly huge nose having gotten in the way. Akira had wondered how he gardened with it on, but maybe it was only for visitors. It was different than the full-face helmet hanging from a hook by the door.

(That and the Baskars would have remembered such a strange-looking thing. It would have been the first thing out of their mouths when asked who brought all the berries: the boy in the funny mask, the one with the long nose. Even its color caught the eye.)

The traveler crouched on the floor, putting the last bit of small berries back into a pot. Herbs dangled from the ceiling in bunches, some of them swinging, and an assortment of vegetables lay scrubbed on the table. Garlic cloves; ginger roots; potatoes. Short-leafed kale and spinach; tiny baby carrots; broccoli on the end of massive stalks. An enormous squash took center place, as yellow as the sun and as big as Akira’s head.

The traveler set the pot on the stove, ducking under the herbs. His hair was wild out of the confines of his half-mask, sticking every which way as if it had never seen a brush before.

Akira shifted; the floor squealed in protest. Part of the traveler’s hair moved before the rest of him did, and they stared at each other.

Akira set the payment on the table. “Triple,” he managed to say.

The traveler nodded, face stony. Akira fled the house.


	2. The Emperor

The thing was, they were supposed to be extinct.

Filgaia’s native people, the animal-eared Elw, hadn’t taken well to the colonization of their mother planet. Where they lived in harmony with nature, man- (and later, demon-)kind abused it, ripping up forests for their towns and fields, letting their spaceships collect rust in the ocean or upon some unused hill. Those who tried to protest or talk comprises were usually found dead the next morning, beaten or shot or hanged. They were said to have brought weapons into town, intending to kill the mayor or the construction leader or just to steal what little rations the colonies had left, and the eventual war that arose killed most of them and drove the rest into hiding.

No one had seen an Elw in centuries. The Ark had reports of a sighting of an Elw girl, no older than ten or twelve, in a town near Baskar’s Colony five hundred years ago, and that was it.

A shadow fell over the page he was reading. The composite sketch of the Elw with her long, furred ears and her hooved hands and her sinister smile felt like a trap waiting to be sprung.

“How barbaric,” Yusuke muttered, tracing the edge of the sketched coat.

“The sketch, or…?”

“The sketch, naturally,” Yusuke said, not bothering to take a seat and instead pounding his fingers into each part of the sketch that offended him. The whole thing, apparently, except for the ears. “In the first place, man has a decidedly dualistic nature. Just as there is good, there is evil, and yet we condemned them when they came to claim what was rightfully theirs. There should be anger, but there should also be grief! What other way should there be for the last of her kind to walk upon the earth?”

“You’ve looked at it before,” Akira guessed.

Yusuke stopped, sat heavily. “Something like it, yes. At Madarame’s insistence.”

“What did he want you to do that for?”

“I fear I’ve forgotten, it was so long ago,” Yusuke admitted. He dragged the book closer, ran another finger down the girl’s face. “But I do remember asking around Baskar Colony if anyone remembered her, whether it was in stories or folktales. There are numerous tales of a cloaked traveler bringing rain with him on his visits, and there has always been a traveler bringing them rare goods. One old man confided in me that a distant ancestor of his saw the face of that traveler. She was just a girl like any other, save for her ears.”

“That so?” Akira said, thinking of fluted ears, like a deer’s, or a horse’s. The shade of them nearly matched his hair; the half-mask must push them down, make them blend in more.

“Hm,” Yusuke said, tracing the edges of her hooves. “She had hands as well, actually. Small things, pale enough to need to be protected from the sunlight, even back then.”

Her garden must not have been enclosed, back then. She must have toiled away in the sun for hours. She must have gotten used to wearing gloves, enough that she didn’t think twice of wearing them to a place like Baskar Colony, where the people were leather-skinned by the time they hit fifteen.

So even the Baskars could be bigots. Perfect.

“What brought on your sudden interest?” Yusuke asked.

Akira shrugged. “Just a thought.”

“Do share, then. You’ve listened to me often enough; it’s time I returned the favor.”

Akira chuckled. That was Yusuke, with his eternity of unpaid debts. You could give him a sandwich and wind up with a vassal. Madarame had raised him exactly how he liked, after all.

(Akira thought of that beaten, broken-down boy struggling under the weight of his Sensei’s pack on top of his own. How he’d been too weak to protest as his mentor shouted at him to _get up, already, Yusuke, we’re burning daylight, don’t you see?_ How his legs had shook even after Akira sliced the weight right off of him, and the withering glare he’d gotten in return.

Akira had followed them out to their campsite some miles out of town and sliced the old man’s throat in the night. Yusuke had shouted himself hoarse, passed out, and then cried when he woke in the morning. Yusuke hadn’t even had a mask back then. Akira had given him his, with the blood spatter still on it.

Yusuke had turned it into art.)

“Just an interest, that’s all,” Akira said, then thought of his fake paramour and added, “I heard they were good with plants. Thought about finding one, asking them if they want to help save the planet. Even if there were any around anymore, it’d be a long shot, right?”

He eyed the list of atrocities the Elw had supposedly committed. It wasn’t a hard list to believe—as Yusuke had said, mankind was just as capable of such acts—but the longer the list went on, the more he started to think… “Maybe it’s a curse. The Elw cursed us, and that’s why the planet is dying. They won’t be happy until we’re all dead, too.”

Yusuke traced the girl’s wicked grin. Five hundred years ago, it might have been a startled, shy smile. He said, “Perhaps we deserve it.”

“Yusuke—”

“Mankind, in all its greed, has ruined what was once beautiful,” Yusuke said. “Mankind has, therefore, even ruined itself.”

“Yeah,” Akira agreed, “but—”

Yusuke grit his teeth. Whatever awful memory Akira had drudged up, Akira could probably match—he remembered watching an execution once, a hanging, for a man who had taken too much from the town well for too long. His wife was sick, he’d sputtered on the gallows. She needed the water or she would die, he explained as they draped the noose over his neck. Akira’s mother hadn’t been quick enough to cover his ears: he could still hear the sharp sound of the man’s neck breaking, could still hear the way his screams cut off mid-breath.

And Akira, knowing that all of them were broken on the inside somehow, had never asked why Yusuke could sleep through one of his teammates dropping their weapons on him in the middle of the night. He never asked what the cuts on Yusuke’s back were from. He never asked a thing, and Yusuke never told; he’d just been happy the Ark had taken him in after he followed Akira back like a lost puppy.

“—that doesn’t mean we can’t atone, Yusuke.”

“Atone,” Yusuke said, dryly.

“Fix things. Make things right again. We aren’t all full of evil deeds; you should know that.”

“No,” Yusuke said, shaking his head and standing, “but enough of us are.”

Long after he’d gone, Akira stared at the book, at the sketch. He couldn’t help but think the same: not everyone was made of evil, but enough people were. People like his parents, and Kamoshida, and Madarame. People like the one who drew the sketch and the ones who hung the first Elw from the trees, and the ones who stood by and watched.

* * *

“Akira, my boy!” Yoshida exclaimed, one hand resting on the ARM at his hip, the wary militiamen at the gatehouse eyeing his group. They were dusty, and there was a dark spattering of blood down Queen’s front, none of it her own, and Akira thought it was good of them to be cautious.

He could have returned to tear Humphrey’s Peak apart, after all.  
“Yoshida,” he said, shaking the man’s hand, taking in his new suit and the fullness of his cheeks. This was not the man he’d helped become the mayor, gaunt and sallow-skinned and clothed in rags from twenty years before.

This was a man who’d regained what he’d lost to hubris and then some.

“So good to see you again,” Yoshida said, pumping his arm. He was still smiling when he said, “And these rapscallions with you—your team?”

He said _team_ the way some people would say _cockroach_.

“A new one,” Akira said. “If you’ve got time, I’ll introduce you.”

Yoshida laughed. The militiamen relaxed slightly at his signal, and one of them retrained his scope on the horizon, scanning for monsters and wayward Drifters and refugees.

Things had changed in Humphrey’s Peak in the years he’d been gone. The streets were cleaner and brighter; groups of ragtag children raced up and down one or another, chasing balls and hoops or playing games of tag. The dead, decorative bushes along the sides of the road had been replaced with berry bushes and tomato trellises, carefully pruned. The houses they passed were whitewashed and shone in the sun, and the windows were open to let in the occasional breeze. More people milled about in the streets than he remembered, and somewhere, someone was grilling vegetables.

“You’ve really been at it, haven’t you?” Akira asked as they passed another group of children playing hacky sack in front of a house while an older woman looked on. The children he remembered—and the child he’d been—were dirty, grimy things with dirt caked on their faces and hair matted with grease. These kids were clean. The dirtiest thing on them were their fingernails.

“Oh, well, I’m hardly the one who spurred them to action,” Yoshida demurred, downplaying his own achievements as usual. “I was only the one who proposed it. Once we had the sewer and pipelines fixed, we found we had more than enough to spare for a treat or two.”

“Sorry?”

“You’ll see. It’s just around the corner up ahead.”

His team tensed at his back; Akira went for his own ARM, cradling the hilt of it. It came alive in his hand, breathed as he breathed, ready and waiting.

“Now, now,” Yoshida said over his shoulder. “Although I don’t begrudge you for caution!”

As they rounded the bend, Akira saw why: in front of him was a building covering nearly the entire block, built of new brick and stone. His mask informed him of a change in the humidity and he waved the warning away, staring, thinking. A group of farmers came out the door as they neared, laughing and jostling, freshly laundered work clothes under their arms. Their faces, in any other town, would be filthy and sunburned; these ones wore large straw hats to shade their eyes, and the dirtiest spot on them was the backs of their ears. Water trickled down from a hairline.

“Yoshida, you didn’t,” Akira breathed.

“I didn’t,” Yoshida said. “As I said, once we’d finished up the repairs we found we had more than enough to spare for a treat or two. Everyone enjoys a nice bath at the end of a long day, don’t they?”

“But—no one has the water for—” Queen choked out, then choked on air as Panther pushed her aside.

“Dibs on trying it!” she called. “You know—for, uh, traps!”

“Traps,” Queen muttered in disbelief.

“And tricks!” Skull added. Akira wondered how hard he’d thought to come up with that one. “’Sides, Panther can’t go it alone, y’know!”

“Tricks,” Noir said, with a very obvious displeasure.

But they waited, eager as dogs at his back, and he let them go. Even Queen and Noir, hesitant but resolute to determine how Humphrey’s Peak could afford a luxury even the Ark didn’t have. Oracle trailed along after them, pausing briefly at the door to look back at them, then ducking inside.

Only Fox stayed behind, like he usually did, and after Madarame Akira didn’t blame him. Sojiro was one thing. Yoshida, with his easy smile and caring nature, probably set off all of Fox’s alarm bells.

“We saw your new expansion coming in,” Akira said. “Clover? Is that really going to help?”

“Ah, well,” Yoshida said, with a strained smile. “We’re trying out a new fertilizer, actually. Clover’s hardy enough, and it’s good for the soil, and if it dies no one will have had their hopes pinned on it, you see.”

“A new fertilizer?”

“Yes! We’ve been hard at work mixing up our own. The Ark isn’t the only place researching how to keep ourselves fed, after all.”

Akira hummed, thinking of the garden.

“Somehow, I don’t believe Balloon flesh to be that useful as fertilizer,” Fox said.

Yoshida laughed. “Oh, you could tell? Monsters—they’re abundant enough and enough of a nuisance that no one’s going to complain if their numbers dwindle a bit. I’d feel worse for using them like this, but I’m afraid we haven’t enough dead to cover every inch.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” Yoshida said. His voice grew somber. “Strange, isn’t it, that we must use the dead, human and monster alike, to stay alive ourselves. What a rotten business it’s all become.”

Akira should have seen the question coming. They’d just been talking about the Elw the other day, and it seemed as if the topic was firmly stuck in Fox’s mind; he asked, “And an Elw? Would you use their deceased, as well?”

Yoshida smile froze. He met Fox’s eyes and said, “If we found one with no family to claim him… Yes, we would. Know that it would hurt me to do so, the same way it hurts me to use our own dead for the cause. An Elw was also a person. I don’t believe they were anything but.”

“And the rest of your people?”

“I try to convince them to do the right thing, and not to follow along when an action goes against their beliefs, but that is all I can do. Most consider themselves happy and lucky to live here, but even they are still frightened of the monsters beyond our fields. I can’t speak for them on this matter.”

“Fox, enough,” Akira warned. Fox, bristling—at the declaration of injustice, at the admittance of inequality, at the very mention of anyone being treated as less than a human being—turned to him. “If you can’t stop, then go.”

Fox sucked in a breath. He wouldn’t be privy to that long and hectic autumn, Akira with his broken leg barely able to travel, much less fight, and Yoshida seeing the rampant abuse of power by the then-current mayor and being disgusted by it. Yoshida was the only reason Akira was still alive, and he wasn’t going to return that care with mistrust.

“My apologies,” Fox said at last, with a short bow. “I—I only—it’s merely the past, come to haunt me again, you see. It is no excuse for my poor behavior, however, and to one in your position, as well.”

“What a world we live in, for our youth to be haunted so young,” Yoshida uttered, more to himself than to either of them. He shook his head, took a moment, then brightened. “But, if you wouldn’t like a bath now, we should hurry—my Yuriko should be pulling a sheet of cookies out of the oven any moment now. They’re remarkable when fresh.”

Fox perked up at the mention of food, questioning how they could have the sugar for cookies, and whether they were beautifully shaped or not, and whether they would taste like the ones he remembered did—like almonds—and Yoshida chuckled and answered each and every one. Akira was quietly glad that Fox’s attention was so easily diverted with food; if it had turned into a full-blown argument Akira might have stormed off himself.

He hated having to choose between his team and his friends.

… He hated having to decide whether the traveler—the Elw, he kept having to remind himself—was his friend or not. He’d started out wanting friendship the same way he had with Yuuki and Hifumi, seeing another lonely soul struggling to survive and wanting to let them know that they weren’t truly the only ones. And despite the traveler’s hostility, Akira kept going back, if only for the secrets of his garden—

—but that wasn’t friendship. Wanting to get to know someone so they’d tell you their secrets, that wasn’t friendship. That was Shido-level manipulation. Akira hated even having to think of it.

What he wanted—what he _really_ wanted—was to be friends with that lonely-looking boy, secret garden or no. Akira had killed a man for less. Fox had hated him for weeks after, glaring at him whenever he walked into the same room, ignoring everything he said, giving him the cold shoulder… until he’d simply stopped one day, saying he was acting childish. Apologizing in a room full of people, most of whom went about their business while pretending not to stare. So Akira had killed the man he called a father-figure, so what? Any monster could have done the same.

Akira stopped thinking there. The traveler—the _Elw_ —would be the one to decide. It was his right, and Akira was tired of taking everything from everyone just to fulfill his own ego.

What good was satisfaction if it left him feeling guilty after?

* * *

Later, after a large dinner at Yoshida’s, Akira toured the town. Couples strolled arm in arm, a handful of orphaned children played jacks in the light streaming out an inn’s window, an old woman sat by her fireplace, rocking as she knitted, oblivious to the boy looking inside. Yusuke caught up to him as he turned a corner.

They walked in companionable silence for a time. Yusuke said, softly, “The Elw supposedly prayed to different gods than ours. I found a book on it here, of all places.”

Akira had never set foot in a temple except to clear it of monsters. The still altars at their cores were sad, decrepit things, as if they were waiting for their masters to return home. “What kind of gods?”

“All kinds,” Yusuke replied. “Ones of fertility, and of solitude, and of justice. Whatever they prized became a god in its own right; loyalty and faith were twins, or so I read. They had gods for the dryness of the summer heat and the humidity of a winter’s night’s promise of snow. It was—it was rather fascinating.”

Vastly different from the four solitary Guardians modern Filgaians worshiped, if they worshiped at all. Temples had long given way to simple shrines tucked into a corner of the house; they were much easier to maintain and much less prone to housing monsters.

“There were even gods for each of the leylines,” Yusuke went on. “Each and every one, all with a different personality, a different background, a different view on life. One of the southern leyline gods—”

“Yusuke,” Akira said, interrupting before he went on a rant over each kind’s differences, and whether he believed the accompanying pictures were accurate enough, “this book—does it still exist?”

_Because you’re all fools, directing your prayers to the wrong places._

“No,” Yusuke said. He stopped, rubbing at an arm as the night chill swept over them. He shivered in his thin shirt. “No, I—it was a children’s book. Mere fancy. It had been passed down in a family in this town, but I recently discovered they sold it for their daughter’s dowry. I can only hope it hasn’t burned by now.”

A book like that—did it belong in the Ark’s library, children’s story or not?

But before Akira could say it, Yusuke said, “I—never got to see it myself. I had been wandering town, waiting for Madarame to finish his business with the mayor, and overheard it. I was too ashamed to ask to participate, so I hid under the window and eavesdropped.”

Yusuke had been filthy, the day they’d met. Everyone usually was, but the dirt had been ground into his cheeks and his hair was a matted nest that wasn’t worth saving. His clothes had been in tatters; his shoes had been falling to pieces. The simple straw hat Madarame had gifted him with had barely given his face any shade. Akira didn’t want to know what he had looked like as a child; likely less taken care of than the orphans, who could still earn their own coin doing the odd jobs the working men and women couldn’t or didn’t have time for.

“It was such a lovely story,” Yusuke mused. “I could almost see the gods themselves, bickering with each other and loving each other despite it. It made me ache to draw something other than a map.”

Akira snagged his sleeve. He stopped talking with a dry chuckle—those days were long behind him, and while he was free to draw whatever he wished, the Ark’s relative lack of paper hindered his development as an artist. He’d gained freedom, only to be hobbled once more.

“Which house was it?” Akira asked. “If we ask them, maybe they can tell us who they sold it to. We can track it down.”

And Akira could take it to the Elw boy. Just for clarification.

Yusuke protested. “No, no, I could never—if they found out I was eavesdropping, I—”

“You were what, six?”

Yusuke nodded.

“Then it’s fine. Even I liked to listen in on story time back then.” Except Akira had been bolder, leaning heavily against cracked open windows to listen in. He gave Yusuke a gentle squeeze. “Besides, I’m here. Anyone who’ll judge you can face me first.”

“You’re far too kind,” Yusuke said.

But he led the way, up one street and down another, getting lost in the dark. He remembered passing by several bushes that had since been replaced with benches; he remembered a creaky gate that had since been oiled. When they did find the house, it was late, and the moon shone full as Yusuke stared at the door.

Akira knocked. The older gentleman that greeted him was wary, rightfully so; no one went around visiting their neighbors in the dead of night. “Yes?” he asked. “Can I help you?”

His wife huddled further in her chair. The bulbs in the lamps flickered; a radiator hummed in a corner. There were easily three bookshelves in the sitting room alone, crammed full of old texts that had seen better days. The Ark was steadily digitizing what it could find, but that meant handing over family heirlooms and hoping Ark tech would become commonplace in the near future.

(Unless they swore fealty to Shido and Ark, it never would.)

“We’re sorry to bother you so late,” Akira said. “My friend here had a question he wanted to ask, about an old children’s book you used to own?”

“A book?” asked the man, still squinting at them—then his eyes went wide. He exclaimed, “You’re the mayor’s visitors! Why in the world didn’t you say so? Come in, come in, don’t stand out in the cold like that!”

“Thank you,” Yusuke said, once the door was closed behind them, basking in the heat of the room.

The wife didn’t seem pleased. Akira didn’t blame her, although her husband seemed ready to make a bed up for each of them, even if it meant giving up his own, just to keep them from going back to Yoshida’s in the middle of the night.

He offered them seats, hard wooden chairs with thin cushions that did little actual cushioning. “To think we have the mayor’s own guests in our house!” he exclaimed. “You know, it’s all thanks to you, lad, that our graveyard has been left untouched. The old mayor wanted to rip it up for the materials and land, saying the wealth would put Humphrey’s Peak back on the map—ha!”

His wife adjusted her shawl. There was a book in her lap. She ran her finger over the design embossed on the cover—how old was it, if that was real leather, real silver? “Dear,” she said.

“Humphrey’s Peak was _always_ on the map! Has been since my granddad’s time, and his granddad’s before him! Tear up the graveyard! Can you imagine that, boys?”

“Yes,” Akira said. New Little Rock had done just that over some rumors that one of the residents had been buried wearing a pair of ruby earrings three hundred years ago, but the tombstones had all been faded by then. It had been cheaper to plow the whole thing up. Akira had had to stop more than one fight between his team and the diggers; it was the reason they’d had to make a deal with the Sugimura family in the first place.

“We’re very familiar with the concept, yes,” Yusuke said. Madarame hadn’t gotten a burial. They’d left him for the monsters.

“Dear, do stop,” his wife asked. “It’s late. These boys only want to know about the book.”

“Do they?” the man asked. “Which one?”

Akira let Yusuke explain, browsing the books on the shelf. Old research journals; old maps; old photo albums. There was a weird plate on display, with a design not unlike a fossil’s imprint on it.

It was… odd. Like the Elw boy, Akira wanted to pull it closer and never let it go, but it was a simple granite plate. There was no reason to feel that way.

No real reason, but the roar of blood in his ears told him otherwise. He could taste salt on the back of his tongue, feel misty spray on his face—

The wife blocked his view. She set her book back on the shelf as her husband explained that they’d sold it to a Drifter boy, no older than Akira and Yusuke were, only a year or two ago.

“And boy, did he look angry about it! All that gella for a simple book—but there were others who wanted to buy it, of course, and he—what was it he said, dear?”

“That he couldn’t bear to see it in anyone else’s home,” his wife replied, staring Akira down.

“Right, that!” the man laughed. “What a strange fellow, he was! Looked like he’d seen the world end a dozen times over, and so young, too!”

“That’s right,” his wife agreed. “It’s not every day you see someone with such a strange eyes, after all.”

“Purple as poison, they were!”

“And hair as fine as the clouds,” she added.

“Right, that! As if he’d been crowned by Fengalon himself!”

“Ah,” Yusuke said. “You’re right. How very strange. Do you believe he still has it?”

The man shrugged. “Hard to say. Drifters like him, they live hand to mouth, see? What would he want with an old kid’s book, unless someone else was offering him more for it?”

To read it, Akira thought. If he didn’t want it in someone else’s home, didn’t that mean it had value to him, even as a simple storybook?

“It won’t hurt to try and track him down,” Akira said. “There’s every chance he still has it.”

“Yes, quite,” Yusuke said. They stood, shook the man’s hand—Winslow Bartlett, he finally told them, and his wife, Susanna—and were reassured that any friend of Mayor Yoshida’s was a friend of theirs, they were welcome any time, take care on the way back—

Before Akira knew it they were back out on the street, the moon’s cool glow making the very air seem colder. Like ice, if ice still existed—sheets and sheets of it falling from the sky like a wall.

He blinked, shaking his head at the lanterns, casting a weak glow over their heads.

“Do you truly think we can?” Yusuke asked after a time.

“Track him down? Yeah,” Akira said. People remembered oddities. White hair and purple eyes would be far more eye-catching than the Elw boy, even in his half-mask.

“Yet another thing I will owe you for,” Yusuke muttered to himself. “The list never ends.”

But it did. Whenever Akira left the Ark without a trace, that was when the list would end. He’d been dreaming of the day since his parents had left him there. He’d wanted nothing more than to rejoin them, then, and now he wanted nothing more than to breathe real air and eat real food for the rest of his days.

“Don’t you worry about that,” Akira said. “Unless chaining yourself to me is the point of all this, Yusuke?”

Akira wasn’t stupid. Yuuki had said it himself, once: he was a magnet. He drew people in. The longer they stayed the more they wanted his attention, his time.

Hifumi had warned him: Shido wouldn’t like that. He wouldn’t stand a power struggle; he wouldn’t stand for a Drifter brat to swoop in and steal his illustrious position.

He could still taste their kisses as they told him, in different words and different tones, that no matter what, they wanted him to live.

“Am I so transparent?” Yusuke asked.

“I’ve had some practice.”

“I am, then,” Yusuke concluded. “Forgive me. I was determined to hate you—you killed him right in front of my eyes, and he was the only father I’d ever known. He was cruel, yes, but does that mean I had to love him less?”

Family was always family. Akira still pined for his own parents himself. “No, of course not.”

“You move as if the world revolves around you,” Yusuke said, and Akira snagged his hand as it brushed by. It was rough with callouses—from the brush he used to wield, to the katana, to the hard labor of taking samples, even in gloves. Akira didn’t doubt that his own were the same. “The rest of us follow in your wake. How could one not fall for a force such as that? And yet—even as you move through the world, as you shake it and turn it aside, I—there’s this feeling, as if you will leave it, one day. You will vanish entirely off the face of the earth. I cannot imagine a life without you in it, in some way.”

“I’m flattered.”

Yusuke squeezed. Like a tether to the present, keeping Akira firmly grounded, keeping him from his lofty dreams of the future. Yusuke knew, like Yuuki and Hifumi did. “Don’t jest, please,” he said. “Please. Let me do my best to keep you here, for now. Let me think I’m having some choice in the matter. And—when you do leave—”

Akira stopped him, one hand pressed to his mouth, in a pool of moonlight that made Yusuke’s pale skin glow. _Don’t,_ he thought. _Don’t ask me to bring you with me. Don’t ask me for some kind of sign._ _Even I don’t know when or if I’ll ever go._

“You’re determined, then,” Yusuke said, once Akira gave him time to breathe.

Akira smiled. He could tell it didn’t quite reach his eyes—he wished, sometimes, that he could simply settle into one place, put his roots down and stop wishing so much for freedom. The whole planet was desert and sky. Why leave the people he loved for a planet that wanted them all dead?

Why couldn’t he have both? The ones he loved and cherished and a bountiful home?

“I’m not,” Akira told him. “I’m selfish.”

Yusuke said nothing, squeezing his hand once again.

Determination, selfishness—it was all the same in the end.

* * *

The Elw boy froze in his own doorway, jaw dropping in shock for a brief moment before he shook himself, slammed the door shut, and stormed over. “You—” he started.

“Hey again,” Akira said, seated on the armchair. The pile of books in front of him wasn’t substantial, but it was nothing to sneeze at, either; Akira was a proficient book-skimmer, when he wanted to be.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Reading,” Akira told him, hefting the book. “I thought, after last time, you’d like a bit of space. I figured waiting for you here would be better received than sneaking up on you in your garden.”

The boy didn’t move. He stood there, box of food balanced on one hip, shears in the other hand, far more tense than Akira had ever seen him.

Akira nudged his weapons belt, coiled on the table. His mask slid from its position nestled on top. “I want to talk. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I have work to do.”

“You can take a break, can’t you?”

He flipped a page, barely reading the contents. Let the boy think Akira didn’t give a damn what race he was—and Akira _didn’t_ , but plans were already whirling inside his head—and do just what he came here for: earn the secrets of the garden. Earn the boy’s friendship.

But damn, for a kid’s book it sure was dark. Goljur, goddess of all mothers, was currently beating her naughty son, Jesjur, god of tricks and pranks, for changing half of Filgaia’s cats into twin-tailed abominations.

(Akira had fought some. They were devilishly smart; it was good, he supposed, to know they’d been around even in the Elw’s time, terrorizing them.)

It wasn’t a spanking, either; he cowered from her, even as she pulled him back in by the collar of his shirt for another slap. Meanwhile the sweet-faced Utjur, god of obedient children, was in the background with his sister, Kalphoratta. Akira wasn’t sure what Kalphoratta was a goddess of, but it probably had something to do with monsters, since she’d taken up one of the new cats and was attempting to pet it.

The Elw thumped into his seat across the table. He leaned his shears against his seat, set his box on the floor, and after some amount of hesitation, pulled his mask off. The ears were still there, and free of their confines, flew straight up, tilted Akira’s way.

Akira let him fidget for several moments, checking the shift of the ears against his hair. Nigh indistinguishable, with the half-mask on, like he’d thought. With it off they twitched and twisted with every creak and groan of the house around them; a muffled noise from outside was likely Morgana, left to nap in the farm house’s shade again.

“You brought that beast back with you?” the boy asked.

“Can’t get here by land any other way,” Akira told him. “Speaking of, how do _you_ get to Baskar Colony from here?”

His eyes narrowed. Suspicion darkened rust-red to a deep, rich brown, like the soil in his garden. Was he aware of it, or was he, like Queen, content to believe it wasn’t true? “As if I’ll tell you,” he spat. “How many times do I have to say that you aren’t welcome here?”

“I’m a Drifter; I go where I please.”

“Do all Drifters pass by Baskar Colony so often?”

“Well, yeah. It has all the food.”

And with the boy’s contributions, Drifters came from all over, eager to get their hands on those revive fruits. Sweeter than peaches, sweeter than even honey, Akira had heard them described. So delicious just a mouthful would bring a man back from the brink of death.

(It was how Kamoshida survived with just a maiming. Shido had been equally furious over the attack killing Kamoshida’s whole team _and_ the waste of resources. Even dried, the fruits were godlike.)

Akira looked back down at the book. The paired god and goddess of fertility were renewing the land—and the people, judging from the rapturous looks on their faces—and blessing them with a plentiful bounty. All of the people had normal, human ears. “Was this what you meant?” he asked. “Before, when you said we direct our prayers to the wrong places. Everyone worships—”

The Elw snorted. “I’d hardly call that worship.”

“Then what’s the right way to worship?”

A glare, filled with as much poison as Yusuke’s had once held. Yusuke had forgiven him, though; Akira wasn’t sure this boy would ever forgive anyone. “As if I’d tell you.”

“Fair enough,” Akira said with a shrug. He could keep his secrets. Akira hadn’t been very forthcoming with his own, after all. He tapped the book with a finger. “But, do you mind if I borrow this? It’s pretty interesting. I’d like to finish it.”

More venomous glares; if the Elw boy’s eyes could shoot poison-coated daggers Akira would be dead a hundred times over by now. If he had to guess, it was because the book was a gift, and not because Akira invited himself into the house to peruse the bookshelves.

“I’ll bring it back,” he promised.

A curling sneer. “Fine,” the boy spat, “now get out.”

* * *

Yusuke was ecstatic when Akira handed the book over. “Careful,” he said, “it’s on loan.”

Yusuke nodded, already absorbed. He didn’t think to ask where Akira found the book until much, much later; Akira only shrugged in answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suppose it should be said that this doesn't quite follow WA3 lore, since we learn next to nothing about the Elw or the culture they would have had pre-colonization, but I also suppose that it doesn't quite matter, since this is set far enough into the future that it's really a giant mix with Dune, but...


	3. The Lovers

“Hey, Joker,” Panther said. She hefted another rock, shifted a different one with her foot, and set it down. “How’s it look? Better?”

“Yeah,” Akira told her. Within a day of them leaving the grave marker would have toppled again, crushing Panther’s bouquet of flowers—made of scraps of cloth and bandages too soiled to save and whatever thread anyone could spare—like the ones from last year, and the year before that.

Three years since Kamoshida’s last foray into the wilderness, pretending to do his job. Three years since the death of his entire team, including Panther’s best friend.

Akira should have fought harder to have her join his team, but no one listened to snot-nosed brats back then. It hadn’t been until he’d started racking up accolades with Panther and Queen that anyone had taken notice; it hadn’t been until they’d come back with Fox hot on their heels that Shido dared to admit that maybe Akira was a talented leader.

Instead, all he could do was fish Yuuki’s latest little trinket out of his pocket and set it on the flattest rock he could find. It was all Yuuki could do anymore to say he was sorry for escaping when none of the others could.

“Great,” Panther said, her grin wavering. She stared at the rock pile, one hand tapping her whip, coiled but ready for use at a moment’s notice.

“Do you think,” she said, before pausing. Choking down a sob, Akira thought; he stepped close and let his hand rest on her shoulder. She took it, squeezing his fingers. “Do you think she’d be proud? That we’re working so hard, and making a name for ourselves?”

“She would,” he said. Shiho had been one of the few members of Kamoshida’s team to actively talk to him, despite Kamoshida warning them not to. He’d been afraid, even three years ago, that Akira would surpass him. Three years and a dozen deaths later, Akira was the one roaming the world while Kamoshida stared into tubes all day.

Revenge tasted of dust and mask-filtered air. Shiho would never come back, no matter how long Kamoshida spent turning dials and pushing levers. Shiho would never sit at their table and lie through her teeth about her newest bruises. Shiho would never hold any of them again and tell them she was glad they weren’t stuck with her.

“Good,” Panther said, and this time she couldn’t hide the sob that escaped her; Shiho had been her whole world, once, and now she had to learn to navigate the rest of her life without her.

Panther’s hand slipped from his. From the tip of her whip she pulled out the spearhead, the only part of Shiho’s weapon they’d been able to recover. It was green with corrosion from an acid-spitting monster that lived near the arena, and one side of the tip had nearly broken off entirely. Despite everyone’s warnings, Panther refused to replace it. Queen complained it was an accident waiting to happen.

Akira let her do it anyway. It was all she had left of her best friend.

“Take your time,” he told her as her knees finally gave out. She crumpled to the earth, shoulders heaving. Before the first of her tears hit, Akira turned away from her.

Better that she mourn alone for a while. Better that she not have her leader watch her waste water out here in the desert with her mask tossed off to the side—all the better to feel the same wind Shiho felt as her blood leaked out of her body, all the better to look at the same blue sky and wish things could get better. Better still that her wails could be carried off to join the death cries of a dozen undeserving children.

But as he turned, in the shade cast by the rock pile, Akira spotted it: a weed, leaves spiked and cutting, stem barely longer than his little finger. No bud or flower, but maybe it was malnourished and didn’t have the nutrients to spare.

The Elw boy’s words echoed: _“I’d hardly call that worship.”_

Was this supposed to be worship, then? Mourning? Giving water to the land without care?

No one would survive a life like that. Only the Elw boy, safe in his isolation with his wet garden, would ever think such a thing—

No, Akira told himself. The Elw boy knew what life was like outside his little hiding place—he traveled often enough to Baskar Colony and had to have heard one thing or another from any of the other traveling merchants and Drifters that passed through—and that was how he knew no one worshiped correctly anymore. He was lucky, yes, but the Elw lived long lives. He had likely been watching the slow death of the world since he was young. He had likely been around when people still worshiped correctly.

Whatever that way was.

Akira swallowed down rage like a bitter medicine: the Elw boy had been around a long time. His mother, too. They’d had time to prepare for the worst outcomes; the rest of the world hadn’t, and that was all there was to it. It was no fault of either of theirs.

But long after they left the grave marker, Akira could only think of the weed, growing steadily over the years, as hardy as a rock.

* * *

The device he asked Yuuki for still wasn’t done— _We’re still testing the weight distributors, Akira, wouldn’t want you to fall to your doom in a ravine, okay_ —and he had the sneaking suspicion the Baskars were going to catch wind of his nightly excursions whenever he visited the colony, if they hadn’t already.

Morgana nuzzled into his neck, mouth nipping at Akira’s hair. Skull and Panther laughed themselves into stitches; Fox tugged out his tablet and began to draw. Oracle hovered by Queen’s side as she double-checked their lodging for the next few days. Only Noir stepped in to help, coaxing the grinding teeth away from his ear and patting the horse like a long lost friend.

But it was Akira the horse followed around as they did their usual survey work, pushing him around with his obscenely huge nose, nudging the sample tubes out of Akira’s hands, dipping into the boxes of weeds to be shredded for mulch.

“No—damn it all,” he said, for the fifth time in an hour, as Morgana casually knocked over yet another box of samples. He dusted off his hands and found himself disappointed by the lack of cling the earth had here, as if it was just waiting for an excuse to give up and die.

Panther laughed, pulling a synth-sugar cube out of the pack at her waist.

Why hadn’t he thought of that?

 _I’ve been working too hard_ , he thought. Panther led the horse out of the field, her suit a bright splash of blood against the dirt; he righted the box, stuffed the last tube inside, and sealed it shut. Fox was waiting nearby with a stack of other boxes, carefully arranging them in the wagon to minimize jostling.

“Huh,” Oracle said.

“What?” Skull asked.

“Trader’s coming in,” she responded, watching the telltale dust trail of a cart drift into the air. “Just a few miles out. Maybe our resident horse magnet can offer a little bodyguarding service while we finish up.”

“What?!” Skull protested, eyes wide under his mask. “Dude, that’s not fair!”

“He is certainly very careful to not trample the plants,” Noir said, and they all turned as one to watch the horse nudge its shovel-like head into Panther’s hips, searching for more sugar. Skull growled at the sight. “But he isn’t being very considerate of our tools. It would be much faster if Joker, say, took him out for a run.”

She giggled. “He’s in very high spirits today, isn’t he? He’d be cuter if we weren’t working.”

Queen muttered, “I wonder how fast he can go…”

Fast enough to clear the otherwise impassable ravines and crevasses breaking up the continents. Fast enough that Akira had, for the longest handful of seconds in his life, felt like he was flying as Morgana’s hooves cleared the ground. It had been the most nerve-wracking thing Akira had ever felt.

Now he lived for it.

Fox, in his usual blunt manner, said, “He isn’t very beautiful, however.”

Akira clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about that. Skull will help you load the rest of the samples; I’ll make sure our new friend doesn’t decide to eat them.”

“Hey! Don’t I get a say in this?” Skull whined.

The girls teased him as Akira clambered over the fence that was supposed to deter Morgana from roaming among the crops. Obviously it never worked; the horse was more than capable of clearing the jump, if not for the damage to his own food supply that would result.

He was a smart horse, Akira could give him that. He was smart enough to recognize the jangle of tack as Akira returned with the saddle and bridle, and stood patiently as Akira tugged at straps and buckles.

Once he’d told Panther what was going on, she took a look herself. “Huh,” she said, peering over the mountain. “But—wouldn’t anyone traveling here be fine? The monsters are practically a joke.”

“Yes, well,” Akira said, carefully not mentioning the handful of absurdly strong monsters he’d seen prowling the continent, “someone here has been making a mess of the work today. Noir thinks a good run’ll do him some good.”

“True, you _have_ been off your game today, Joker,” Panter teased. Soon after doubt crept in. He knew what she was thinking—after the visit to the grave site, how could he not? “You think they’re okay all by themselves?”

“We’ll see,” he said. Morgana tossed his head; the reigns jangled like coins trading hands.

Panther ran a thumb across the coil of her whip, the rusted spearhead nestled in the center. Enough to take out a whole legion of Balloons, as long as her arm didn’t get tired—although Akira hadn’t had the chance to test out how well Morgana reacted to weapons being thrown around in the heat of battle. He was a good horse; Akira didn’t doubt that he’d squashed his fair share of spineless monster beneath his hooves.

“Want to come with?” Akira asked, and she jumped.

She glanced back to the field—Fox and Skull doing the rounds collecting sample boxes, Queen sticking close to Oracle’s side as she snipped and pruned and cataloged, Noir patiently explaining why root samples were beneficial to a pair of young, excitable Baskar children, their skin brown and peeling from the sun. It was Queen who glanced up and nodded. No one else would dare tell Panther it was alright to grieve as excessively as she had. No one else would dare to tell her that it was alright to keep grieving for as long as she needed.

“Sure,” she said, and after some maneuvering that made several nearby Baskar snicker, they were heading out the village gate. She squirmed behind him.

“You’ve never ridden before?” Akira asked.

“No,” she said. “Who has horses these days? Who has horses to _ride_? Nobody, that’s who.”

“Hear that? Be a gentleman, Morgana,” Akira commented to the horse. Panther whacked him in the side.

He was, heading at a stately trot down the trail along the mountain, skirting the beach where the sandship sat waiting, shining under the sun. Akira would do his usual make-up sweep of the interior before it was loaded up, but this close to the Colony, no one expected anyone to make off with it. No one outside of the Ark would know how to work it, for one; Oracle had a dozen sensors and alarms rigged to go off in case anything man or monster so much as breathed on it, for two.

(No one dared to go against the Ark by stealing one of their expensive crafts, for three. The last time someone had tried, the pursuer Shido sent after them came back proudly covered in dried blood and bits of bone.)

And, later, once they were back at the Ark, Skull would whine and moan and still manage to sound like it was all no big deal, not if it meant their fearless—reckless—leader got a bit of time to himself. After Shiho, Skull wasn’t about to take his friends for granted.

Akira never had. Until now, until the secret garden, until the last member of a race everyone thought was extinct pointed a pair of gardening shears at his head.

Now… he wasn’t so sure, anymore.

“So,” Panther said, searching for conversation as a pair of Balloons drifted by. With a flick of her whip they were nothing but flesh and goo upon the desert sands. “Uh, how’s everything going with that lover of yours?”

Akira imagined telling her the truth: the shears, the sneers, the garden—but no. He promised not to, and he kept his promises. “Fine,” he said. “He’s just—very shy. Like Oracle, but worse. I don’t know how he’s lived this long without other people.”

“But,” she drawled, “is he _cute_?”

“Probably,” Akira said, without thinking. The Elw boy only ever scowled at him. It was definitely not doing the legends any disservice.

“Probably?” She snorted. “You don’t know?”

He ran his tongue over his teeth, stalling. “No,” he said, at length. “No, I—I met him on accident. Found this—this old, old building out in the middle of the mountains. He thought I was a monster about to turn the place into its nest. Things happened.”

“Things,” she repeated, dryly.

“Things,” he said, just as the source of the dust trail came into view: a lonely-looking black speck of a man hauling a hand-cart behind him, plodding along as resolutely as a mule. Akira nudged Morgana to a canter; Balloons were floating in the cart’s wake, and Akira could see the sharp glint of a pack of Gob’s hatchets hot on their trail.

“Like what kind of things?” Panther groaned. “Give me details! _Joker_!”

“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell,” he told her, and let her beat at his back in frustration as Morgana neared the traveler. The helmet looked familiar; the patchwork suit even more so.

The Elw boy, with one of his deliveries.

Morgana, who was definitely affectionate today, nearly stopped him cold by stopping to nudge at his shoulder. “Can I help you?” the boy sneered, hands flexing on the handlebar, voice odd through the electric whine his helmet’s microphone.

So he wanted to play this game? Fine by Akira; as far as any of his teammates knew, his most recent interest was some shy wallflower who never left the safety of home. Akira could conjure up a dozen reasons as to why—the monsters roaming down the path notwithstanding—and all of them would make sense. Not everyone could drift from one town to the next; not everyone had the mettle to travel freely. The Sugimuras were proud of the fact that they’d never had to lift a weapon or step foot out of their little settlement in nearly three generations. By the end of her engagement, Noir had been ready to slice her fiance in half with her ax. She’d done in the table instead.

“Just came to see if you need any help, stranger,” Akira said.

“Hello!” Panther called, waving her whip.

“I’m fine,” the boy said, not quite sharp enough to bite, but it made Panther pause. He moved his cart out of Morgana’s way and continued back down the trail, raising one hand to block the sun as he took a glance at the Forgotten Sanctuary, its walls nearly crumbled to dust.

Even the temples didn’t last forever. The great Guardians had truly abandoned them all.

Panther hopped off the horse, stretching her back before hurrying to catch up. Akira heard her tell the boy, “Aw, come on, we’re just being friendly—” before he nudged Morgana into that full gallop he loved so much, right at the pack of monsters streaming down the trail. The Spiny Backs were no match for the draft horse’s hooves, and Akira’s ARM made quick work of the Balloons, and soon enough they were running through free space, just the empty blue sky and the vast wasteland and the mountains, ringing them in. With his arms spread wide and the ragged tears of his older, less resilient suits flapping behind him, he could almost pretend he was flying, free as a bird.

Then Morgana slowed back down to a trot, flicking an ear back to the trail, the Colony, and Panther’s incessant chatter. His sides heaved. Akira spotted the flashes of sun off Gob hatchets as they fled across the land bridge; he hoped they didn’t cause much trouble in Jolly Roger.

“Alright,” Akira told him, “as long as you stop with the nuzzling, okay? You’re a horse, not a house cat.”

Morgana snorted, already turning. He tossed his head, skirted the carcasses, and caught up to the pair in no time. Panther was in the middle of asking what he was trading, and Akira was sure the boy was two seconds away from whipping out a weapon from nowhere and spearing her through. Akira tapped her shoulder with his boot.

“Not everybody’s built for conversation,” he reminded her, “and sometimes you get used to the quiet. No need to pressure him to talk, Panther.”

“You’re so boring,” she told him over the comms.

He shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

She humphed, squaring her shoulders. Morgana nudged her—damn it, horse—for another synth-sugar cube. The Elw boy watched her pull out another and said, “I’d be careful. That beast of yours might expect food every time it sees you, now.”

“Huh, really?” Panther asked, even as said beast nipped the cube right off her outstretched hand.

“Yes, really,” was the reply, because now Morgana knew where Panther kept her stash of sugar cubes and was trying to pull it open. Panther swatted at his nose, frowning at the horse slobber on her suit and the strength of his teeth.

“Morgana. Behave,” Akira warned.

And Panther watched, awed, as Morgana pulled back with a derisive snort and a toss of his head.

* * *

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect to see you here,” Akira said, once the boy was settled with his trades and his cart was loaded back up. His mask’s output was set to the lowest frequency, and it sounded more like static than a whisper. “You actually talked to someone. I’m impressed.”

“I can hold a conversation when it interests me,” the boy said, double checking the ties on his boxes. The claws on the tips of his gloves made it more work than it had any right to be; Akira lounged against the fence post, occasionally glancing over to watch, pretending to be more interested in his charts. Skull, at least, didn’t have to fill out Akira’s paperwork.

“Ah, so I don’t interest you?”

“No one interests me,” the boy snarled, slamming one claw-tipped fist against his purchases. More tubing, Akira guessed. More pipes. Probably nails, for the jagged hole in the floor Akira had spotted sneaking through the house the last time. All the wood in the world wouldn’t fix that hole if there was nothing to hold it in place.

“Anymore,” Akira said.

“Oh?”

“No one interests you _anymore_ ,” Akira elaborated. “They likely haven’t since your mother passed, and that uncle of yours certainly can’t be alive anymore, can he?”

Stony, unsettled silence, like the eerie calm before a sand storm. He’d be glaring daggers, eyes as full of bloodlust as Queen’s when she was in a bad mood, but the jagged edges of his full-head helmet screamed for him: _Shut up. Don’t talk to me. Don’t you dare create any more interest in me than you already have. I’ve lived this long without nosy busybodies plunking their asses down on my property. Shut_ up _._

Instead the boy said, “You sound so sure it was _my_ uncle.”

Akira shrugged. It could have been the Bartlett’s uncle. It could have been anyone.

But _Hoping this will heal your heart_ wasn’t a normal uncle thing to write on a book. Not to a kid. Not to a kid in a relatively well-to-do family like the Bartletts. What kind of trauma could a child receive that only a book of fairy tales could heal?

But to an Elw, who believed all their stories had fallen into the cracks of history, gone and forgotten—it would make much more sense.

“Sounds to me, if he really is your uncle, he doesn’t care much about what you are.”

“Is that so?” the boy said. “Tell me, then, if _you_ wouldn’t care.”

Akira glanced up from his charts. Noir and Oracle chatting in a corner of the field as they took their break, sipping on weed-juice—as Oracle liked to call it—Oracle’s goggles focused on Akira and the traveler behind him. Their comms were off; aside from the one message Panther had sent, they’d been off all day, and with their full-face masks, it would be impossible for her to read their lips.

He still shuddered. Gods, what would he do if Oracle found out about the boy? What would he do if all these little pieces just happened to coalesce into the truth? What would he do if his team demanded it?

His team—his family—what would he do if one of them had Elw blood? Could he treat them like anyone else?

No, a better question would be: why wouldn’t he?

“I wouldn’t,” Akira said, as the boy knelt down to check his wheels. He snorted; Akira defended, “No, I wouldn’t. At this point it doesn’t matter what kind of blood runs through our veins. If we don’t get our acts together, this planet is doomed.”

“How are you so sure you can fix it?”

“Because I have to be. Because all it takes is one person to start great change. Because there are people around me who will follow.”

The boy snorted again. He took up the handlebar, eased himself under, and said, “What you mean is that all it takes is one ship to spark change.”

One ship. Of course; the first colonizers. Humans and demons alike, alighting on a rich, lush new planet to call home and ripping it to pieces.

There were no words for the emotions those thoughts made Akira feel. He had no way to even begin saying how much he wanted to turn back the hands of time and hide this planet from the sight of every man, woman, and child that would ever exist. _Sorry_ would never be enough.

He asked, “Will you be alright on your way back, traveler? The sun’s going to start setting soon.”

“I’ve been fine enough, haven’t I?” was the sneered response. “I don’t need you following me around.”

“Fair enough,” Akira said, and waved as he walked off.

Panther stared openly; Akira met her gaze until she pouted. “No fair. _You_ can talk to him, but I can’t?”

“The trick is to talk _to_ him, and not _at_ him,” he said and hopped the fence, tablet tucked neatly under his arm, as Panther ran for him, arms swinging.

“I do not talk at people!” she insisted. “I talk to them! Don’t I, Skull?”

Skull shrugged, squatting on his hams in the middle of the dirt. His throat worked as he sucked down water from his suit’s reclamation tanks.

“Fox?”

Fox, who was tugging the tattered tail clipped to his suit’s belt out of the children’s hands again and not paying much attention to anything else, said, “Pardon?”

“You guys suck,” Panther declared. Fox looked confused before he tugged at his tail again; Skull didn’t seem to care.

Despite their nagging, no one seemed to notice when Akira sneaked off again that night, making a short stop to check out the ship before continuing on to the boy’s house, Morgana skirting the same massacre site as earlier, even in the dark. Akira could smell the iron on the air, the blood splashed on the ground. Gnashing teeth and tearing flesh made it apparent that the boy had, at least, had next to no trouble getting back. He wasn’t even surprised when Akira knocked on the door, back in his well-worn clothes, the patchwork suit and helmet flung to the floor.

Akira picked up the helmet, the jagged visor reminiscent of bat wings, and hung it on the peg. He brushed dirt and sand off the suit before hanging that, too. “You should take better care of your tools,” he said.

On reflex, he flipped open one of the reclamation tanks, pulled out the filter—

—and gagged, just as the boy said, “I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”

He shut it quickly, but it was too late. He checked for the others, all forming mold across the thin skein. The cleanest one was the one at his back, but even that still had spots. Akira showed it to him. “Do you see this?”

The boy eyed it, lip curled. “Yes. It’s a filter.”

“And the stuff on top of it?” He grew plants for a living. Everyone did, although the mere sight of mold was becoming a thing of the past, although Yoshida had mentioned an extensive cleaning program for the new bathhouse specifically so it wouldn’t start up.

The boy didn’t answer. Whether it was out of embarrassment for being found out or for not knowing, Akira decided he didn’t care. He dug into a pocket, dragged the suit over to the chair by the window, and tore it apart: tubing that could salvaged with enough sand rinses to his right, ones that couldn’t to his left; the miniature brush steadily working away at the filters until they were clean, damn it, and not likely to poison the kid.

As he worked the boy took a seat on the other side of the table, a variety of patches and some thread in his hands. He looked it over for tears, patching where he could, even over several older patches that had worn and come loose.

The boy said, so quietly it might have been the creaking of the house around them, “Mom never wore a suit. She wasn’t afraid.”

“If she never wore one, how did you get this one?”

Akira glanced up long enough to watch him look to the bookcase and back. The uncle, then. So Akira had been right about the book.

“Well, I guess you’re in for a crash course on how to maintain it, then,” Akira told him. “We’ll need some sand, the fine kind, for starters…”

(By the time he returned to Baskar Colony the next day, he was nearly asleep in the saddle. His team, sans Queen, looked almost amused; Queen gave him a lecture the likes of which Baskar Colony wasn’t likely to forget, and then dumped half of Skull’s workload on him, to keep him awake.

If anyone noticed the new patches on his suit, no one said a word.)

* * *

It was only when he was back in the Ark’s cafeteria, tongue pushing at another stubborn clump of rice stuck to his teeth, that he realized: not only had the boy answered the door sans helmet and mask, he’d sat there meekly, doing whatever Akira instructed, and Akira hadn’t given two thoughts to his ears. Had barely noticed them, even as they twitched.

He was just another person, in the end. Just another human being, struggling to survive on a world determined to kill them all—no, on a world Akira and his ancestors had doomed to a long, slow death.

“Don’t tell me it’s more bad rice,” Sojiro commented over his puzzle book.

“It is,” Akira informed him. Futaba nodded at his side, staring into her bowl like it was the deepest of abysses.

Sojiro sighed, and went to the phone. As soon as his back was turned, Futaba scraped the rice out of her mouth. It wiggled on her fingers; he plucked it up with a towel and squashed it.

“It’s aggressive!” Akira called, and Sojiro waved a hand in acknowledgment.

“How disturbing,” Yusuke muttered, and the team nodded as one. Ann poked at her rice, searching for movement, and Ryuji glared at his bowl until he took it up and shoveled rice into his face.

“Gotta show it who’s boss!” was his muffled explanation. He proceeded to chew so aggressively that Akira hoped the rice wasn’t taking notes.

Gods forbid they wind up with sentient food. The monsters were bad enough.

It made Haru giggle, and Makoto groan, but at his place at the far end of the table, Yuuki went green and paled all in the space of five seconds. Akira couldn’t remember if aggressive chewing was a habit of Kamoshida’s—as a vat tech, he ate with the other vat techs in a shoddier, more thrown together cafeteria in the food production wing—or if this was just another panic attack, happening at exactly the wrong moment. No one else seemed to notice, too taken in by Ryuji’s show.

Akira leaped from his seat and dragged Yuuki out the door. Down the hall was another blind room, and he flicked the lights off as they entered. Yuuki gasped as the room went dark.

“Remember what you told me,” Akira said; Yuuki grunted, trying to talk. Akira had to coax him down to the floor, Yuuki’s hands twisted into his shirt, his breathing too shallow and uneven.

It took several tries and even more minutes of them sitting there, Akira rubbing warmth into his back, Yuuki clinging and struggling just to breathe, before he said, “What if it’s him?”

“Kamoshida?”

Yuuki nodded against his chest. His voice was hoarse with disuse; while Kaoru was enough of a talker, the shipyard usually wasn’t the best place to have a conversation, and Yuuki spent more and more of his time there. It was the farthest place on the Ark from Kamoshida. It was the only place loud enough to drown out the echoes in his head. “He’s a vat tech now,” he said, voice wobbling. “It could be him. It could—it—”

“He’s not that tech-savvy, Yuuki, remember?” Akira said, because Yuuki’s heartbeat under his fingers was too fast. “And if he’s trying to get back at us, he’s making an enemy of the whole Ark. Of Shido. He’s not that stupid.”

 _He’s not that suicidal_ , Akira almost said. If he was, he would have gone down ARM blazing, in a fight to the death with that Hobgob. Instead he added, “He’d be in it for the glory of perfecting the food. He should be. Once it’s perfect the Ark can have every town, village, settlement, and colony on the planet under its thumb. But that’ll take a long time, and more patience than he’s got.”

Yuuki nodded again, sniffling.

“Iwai won’t let him hurt you.”

Another nod.

“ _I_ won’t let him hurt you.”

His hands gripped tighter.

“We don’t have to be dating or teammates for me to want to do that. You remember?”

“Yeah,” Yuuki said, and in a softer voice, “Iwai says I’m—I’m irreplaceable.”

Akira shut his eyes against the dark of the room. There were Yuuki’s tears on his shoulder, soaking into his shirt; there was the subtle slowing of the quaking of his body. “You are,” he said.

Everyone was, in their own way. Shiho was irreplaceable. Ms. Isshiki was irreplaceable.

Akira’s parents. Yusuke’s parents. The Elw boy’s whole people.

“But I left them,” Yuuki said, rehashing the same old argument: that he wasn’t a good person for thinking of himself at his lowest; that he wasn’t worth Akira’s time or energy or love. Yuuki had been the one to dump him in a depressed fit; Yuuki had pushed him away first.

“And no one blames you for it,” Akira said, remembering something else. “Yuuki. I won’t be angry. No one will, okay? When was the last time you took your pills?”

“I don’t deserve pills,” Yuuki muttered.

“When was the last time you ate? Slept?”

“I have to—have to finish the—”

The device Akira asked him for, the device Iwai had sworn would be ready when it was ready and not a moment before. Akira should have guessed it was progressing a little too fast for something as outlandish as what he’d requested. “That’s what you have a team for, Yuuki,” Akira said. “To help you. Unless you’re trying to say that Iwai’s just another Kamoshida?”

“No!” Yuuki cried, the loudest he’d been all evening. “No, not like—but I—I wanted you to be proud of me. For finishing it faster than Iwai thought.”

“I am proud of you,” Akira said, knowing it was futile.

Sure enough, Yuuki shook his head. He didn’t bother to elaborate; they both knew his reasons by now, and they both knew that his mind couldn’t be swayed. Yuuki latched onto guilt in the same way that Akira latched onto freedom: in their mind’s eyes these were both inevitable futures just waiting to come to pass.

One day Akira would leave this Ark that was sailing on to a new future and bribing the smaller towns out of house and home for testing sites. One day Akira would be able to walk on his own two feet and go wherever he pleased, instead of following a schedule.

Damn the schedules, and the constant monitoring, and Shido’s paranoia. Damn what the Ark had become.

Damn what the world had become. Damn humans and demons for making it so.

For now, he stayed there, running his hands through Yuuki’s hair as if he drifted off into a deep sleep. Too many all-nighters, too many days without food, gods only knew how long it had been since he’d taken his pills or seen the doctors.

What sort of world would they have to grow into? What sort of life would Yuuki and his team have to live five, ten, fifteen years from now? How many towns would be erased by the desert winds by then? How many harvests would fail?

How many people had to die before the planet was satisfied?

He left a message with Kaoru as he put Yuuki to bed: give him some time off to see the doctors. Akira didn’t care how long it took for the completion of the device, but he did care about Iwai letting one of his apprentices run himself into the ground; the pill bottle, when Akira shook it, was empty. Maybe that was why Yuuki had worked himself into a frenzy.

Shinya, the ARMsmith’s apprentice, ducked down the longer Akira went on, the game of chess they’d been playing left forgotten. Kaoru had replaced the missing pieces with scrap iron trinkets and sand-worn rocks, and the result was a decided mish-mash of armies. The white king was tiny in comparison to his pawns, and the twisted, bent shape of a black knight coiled more like a serpent than a horse.

“Sorry,” Akira said.

“You just worry, that’s all,” Kaoru blew it off, moving a piece.

“Is he sick?” Shinya asked, and dared to lean over to stare at the door to Yuuki’s bunk.

“Kind of,” Akira and Kaoru both said, at nearly the same time. Kaoru shrugged.

“Dad says it’s just head stuff,” Kaoru explained. “The medicine helps out, but I don’t think Mishima likes the way it makes him sleepy. He hates the last bell. Dad has to fight him just to punch out for the night.”

Which meant Yuuki—even after five years spent under Iwai’s wing, even after five years out from under Kamoshida’s thumb—still didn’t feel comfortable being vulnerable around the shipyard’s master and the other workers. Not even sleeping with the younger apprentices was enough.

Akira scrubbed his face with a hand.

“I’ll remind Dad about it,” Kaoru assured him, sensing his annoyance. “He said—the doctors did too—that these kinds of things take time. We’re trying, Akira.”

“I know,” Akira said. “I know, I just—I wish he’d trust you all more. I wish—”

Kaoru and Shinya waited for him to finish. Akira wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been going for: _I wish he’d trust me more; I wish he’d trust the doctors more; I wish—I wish—_

He might as well have been wishing for the planet to be lush and green when he woke in the morning. Miracles simply didn’t happen; whatever power the gods possessed was gone, and they’d turned their backs on the human race.

Shinya said, “I wish things were better. The rice tried to eat me today.”

He moved a piece. Kaoru laughed. “I wish things were better too. Maybe if only the meat did it—”

Shinya scowled. “That stuff’s not meat. It’s tofu. It’s _soybeans,_ and it was grown in a vat.”

“Even if it looks like meat?”

“It lies,” Shinya declared. “It looks like meat, but it’s not meat. It doesn’t taste the same.” He turned to Akira. “It doesn’t, right? It’s different.”

“It’s better than monster meat,” Akira informed him, and grinned at the disgust that flashed across Shinya’s face. “But—Kaoru, tell your dad I’ll stop by sometime. Just to talk. We haven’t done that in a while, have we?”

“You haven’t talked with us or Mishima in a while, either,” Kaoru said, finally moving another piece. He took one of Shinya’s pawns and held it up, wondering aloud. “Does something have to be wrong for you take notice? Are the only relationships you have ones where you help and be helped in return?”

“What’s that mean?” Shinya asked.

“I’ve just been busy,” Akira said, knowing that it sounded like an excuse, but not having anything else. Busy with the surveys and sample-taking. Busy researching. Busy sneaking out in the middle of the night to visit a boy who hadn’t let him step foot in his garden after that first time.

“Dad says you’re going to leave one day.”

Shinya fumbled his next move. His rook sprawled across the board, knocking pieces out of their squares. Kaoru didn’t notice or didn’t care. “He says it’s in your blood, that you’re a Drifter to the core. Even he can’t help but wish he could, too, but with his leg the way it is, he can’t. Do you—do you hate it here? Enough to want to leave?”

Akira opened his mouth to say no—and realized that was a lie. He did hate it here. He hated the cramped, sterile corridors. He hated having to listen to Shido. He hated worrying over whether a single misstep would be the end of not just him, but his whole team. He hated listening to the Ark’s missionaries when they were out trying to push another new fertilizer or farming technique or water-collector on another town that couldn’t afford it.

“I don’t hate you,” he said instead. The people he’d met over the years—they’d never done anything wrong, not entirely. The ones that had met swift ends.

Kaoru’s jaw clenched. Shinya stared at the board with wide, glassy eyes.

“I don’t,” Akira insisted, fixing the pieces on the board, moving the rook back to its spot. “I could never hate you. What I hate is—”

Both boys stared at him now. Shinya looked pissed as he wiped tears from his eyes; Kaoru just looked resigned, ready for whatever Akira threw his way. Akira was very aware of the cameras; Hifumi had never gotten around to telling him which ones had microphones installed.

But Kaoru and Shinya deserved to know, not to wonder. Even if everyone else was left to flounder for an answer, Akira couldn’t leave them to waste their lives away thinking it was them all along, that he hated everything about them. It just wasn’t true.

“—Shido and his Ark,” Akira said, low and conspiratorial. “The towns that can’t afford the Ark’s tech are left to rot. The ones that do get taken in owe him for generations. This can’t be what the Ark was meant for. His elites—and his workers—can’t be the only ones to benefit while sitting back and watching the rest of the world sink into the sand.”

He left out the rest: there would never be enough space aboard the Ark for everyone on the planet. It was a smaller, salvaged colony ship leftover from the days when mankind traveled the stars, yes, but it wasn’t big enough to hold everyone. The food supply would never keep up with demand. And even if Shido tried to use it to abandon the planet and move to a new one, nothing would ultimately change.

Humans were a destructive, selfish creature at heart. No one person was immune to the call of keeping something beautiful to himself, and the men and woman Shido surrounded himself with always jumped on the chance to take credit for some find or another—and to dole out blame. They’d carve up a new planet into their own private kingdoms.

“But it’s all we have,” Shinya said.

“I know,” Akira said, patting his shoulder. “I know it is. It’s all I have, too. But it can’t stay this way. There’s no point if we survive but everyone else dies from something we could have prevented.”

He still remembered coming across a gang of homeless men huddled together in an alley. He couldn’t remember the town, could barely remember their faces, except that they were skin and bones, save for the bulge of their stomachs. By the end of his parent’s stay there, the group had dwindled down to half, and Akira had screamed at the sight of one man chewing on another’s hacked-off foot.

“Don’t look at them, Akira,” his mother had told him, and he’d hid his face against her well-worn skirt. She’d complained about the price of the food at the saloon, about the taxes to take water out of the well, about the bugs in their beds—and Akira had wondered why it all cost so much when the town was so poor.

Someone could have saved those men. At the very least they could have died more worthwhile deaths than starving in some street.

Kaoru nodded, looking back at the chess board. He reached out to take Akira’s wrist in his grip. “Until you leave, you’re still here, right?”

“Yeah,” Akira told him. “For as long as I need to be.”

“Good,” was Kaoru’s shaky response. Shinya latched onto his other hand and moved his rook with a sniffle.

* * *

Akira watched them play until they were too tired to stay awake, forcing them to bed when Shinya began to nod off right in his seat.

As he sat there, wondering what to do with the chess set, Ann wandered over. She took Shinya’s seat, twirled a bishop in her hand, and plunked it down. “Is he okay?” she asked.

“He’ll be fine once he gets a new prescription,” Akira told her. She nodded, pigtails bobbing.

“And you? Are you okay?”

“Just realizing that I’m not as unreadable as I thought I was.”

“Ouch,” she said, moving another piece. She stared at the board, the layout unrecognizable. She didn’t play chess. She and Ryuji only ever played checkers or card games. “But… it’s true, isn’t it? You could mean to come back, but wind up like Shiho.”

In a monster’s belly or as fertilizer for the latest batch of crops. “I know,” he said.

“And either way, no one will get to see you again.”

“I know,” he said, reaching over to brush her bangs out of her eyes, as blue as the sky on a clear desert morning. “I don’t like the thought of never seeing any one of you ever again, either.”

“Then you should _say_ so,” she said, biting her lip. “Getting into that head of yours isn’t easy, you know. You make it so hard. We just want you to trust us.”

_I wish he’d trust me more._

“I do trust you,” Akira said. “Ann, I do trust you. I trust all of you—”

“It’s not the same!” she cried. She always cried so easily. Maybe the weed was proof of how much Ann loved and mourned all in one. “Out on the field, that’s different! But when we come back and you close yourself off, it’s—it’s frustrating. How can we really trust a leader that’s never open with us? If Makoto hadn’t figured it out, were you ever going to tell us about that lover of yours?”

“He’s not my lover,” Akira said, glancing at Yuuki’s door. Still shut.

“Yet,” she said.

Akira turned back to her. “I mean we haven’t done anything—”

“Yet,” she said again.

“—and I don’t want to force him to,” he finished. “I told you, he’s like Futaba was.”

“Like Yuuki is.”

He shrugged. Being shy and being a depressed, socially-anxious mess due to years of abuse were different.

“So, what? You’re only interested in the mystery of it? You’ll want him as long as he’s interesting but you’ll drop him like a ruptured venom sac as soon as you learn enough? What’s your type, anyway?”

Akira blinked at her. “My… type.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Your type. Spill it, leader-man.”

“You make it sound like I have one,” he said, ruminating over Yuuki, Hifumi, that one reporter he’d fake-dated for a few days. The only thing they’d had in common was their need for help—damn it, Kaoru—and their passion.

(Although the affair with the reporter had been settled more like a business transaction than breaking up, but…

In Akira’s mind it still counted.)

She groaned, flopping onto the board. Pieces scattered or caught in her hair, and Akira untangled them as she said, “You’re hopeless. Maybe the rest of us want a turn.”

“A turn?”

“Yeah,” she said, not elaborating. “A turn.”

So she was embarrassed. Likely the rest of his team was, too. Having feelings for their leader was one thing—but all of them, at roughly the same time? “Even Ryuji?” he ventured.

“He misses his bro time.”

That had to be a lie. Akira still met up with him in the gym three times a week when they weren’t out nearly getting themselves killed. Akira wanted to know if bro time really translated to dating, anyway. “Even Futaba?”

“She’ll never come out and say it, but she came out of her room for _you_ , you dork.”

That… really had to be a lie. She’d come out of her room because some of Shido’s people were questioning why they would keep her around if she didn’t do anything aside from eat their food. She came out because she didn’t want to be a burden on Sojiro anymore.

“Because,” Ann was saying, “maybe our type is a suave, sophisticated leader who can get the job done, shows interests in our interests, and is a total dork about it all.”

“Now you’re just flattering me,” he said, leaning back.

“But it’s true,” she protested. “You charm the socks off of everyone you meet. You helped Mayor Yoshida become mayor with a broken leg! You found a new home for that fortune-teller! I don’t know how you do it, but you do—and I think you should know what that does to people.”

 _The rest of us follow in your wake_ , Yusuke had said, a long, long time ago. “No,” he said, “I do know. But, Ann—the last thing I want is to scare you off with unwanted advances that make you think you have to deal with them. I won’t be another Kamoshida. I won’t push my will on my team and then wonder why it’s all falling apart at the seams. If you want something, you need to tell me.”

Yusuke, with his upbringing, hadn’t had the words for it. Akira wasn’t quite so skilled at reading him that he was sure of what the artist wanted, but the look in his eyes, like he was disappointed Akira hadn’t read him correctly… All that would take to fix was a single conversation.

The girls, though. He had to be careful with them. He had to be sure.

He wanted to be sure.

“Okay,” she said. Then she took his hand and held it.

“Is this it?” he asked.

“Yup,” she said. “After Shiho—well, I’m not sure I want to be in a relationship right now. But holding hands is nice, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he admitted. Yusuke’s had been warm against the cold desert night. Yuuki’s had always trembled for the first few minutes. Hifumi had always held his hand over their chess matches.

And it was better than Yuuki, throwing himself into every bit of affection he could think of to make Akira happy, with next to no thought on whether he really wanted it. That was another reason he’d dumped Akira— _I think I rushed into this. Can we just be friends? Just for a while?_ —but he’d been honest. Akira was willing to give him a second chance whenever he decided he deserved it.

… And it was infinitely better than sitting around and skirting the issue like Morgana had the pile of monster carcasses, always careful not to spend too much time with any one of his team members at a time, always concerned with the way it looked to the outside. After Kamoshida, Akira had tried not to be too friendly with his teammates, even when they were back at the Ark, awaiting new orders.

Now he knew he could. Now he knew she—and the rest of them—wanted him to.

The only thing that felt better was the cool mist of a secret garden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One day I'll go back through and edit this so it's not such a mess, but for right now...


	4. The Priestess

When he knocked, the boy wasn’t home.

Akira considered doing what he usually did when he came by and the boy didn’t bother to answer the door—let himself in, read books in the scant moonlight coming in the window, work a bit on the patch on the floor—but tonight, he decided, was different.

(Although he did leave the boy’s book on the table, ready and waiting for his return.)

Instead, he stood out in the cold desert night by the hidden door, scanning for footprints as he waited. The boy must have learned after the first time: every trace of his presence was gone, and Akira couldn’t even be sure which section of wall he’d pressed to open the door in the first place.

It was his mother’s final resting place. Akira could leave him that. It was the least he could do.

So, he waited. Morgana wandered over, leaning against him. His suit went wild—he was too cold on one side, too warm on the other—and the warnings, no matter how often he blinked them away, came back, over and over again.

The door slid open. “Oh,” said the boy, sans his half-mask, ears twitching, “it’s you.”

“Evening,” Akira said.

“What do you want?”

“To pay my respects to your mother.”

That threw the boy; he took a step back, eyeing Akira warily.

“I brought a gift,” Akira added.

“None of those chemicals, I hope,” the boy said, turning that shrewd gaze to Morgana and his saddlebags.

“No, it’s not. I wouldn’t dare.” Akira, who’d had his hands shoved in his pockets to warm them, took out the little four-leaf clover he’d found on the team’s most recent visit to Humphrey’s Peak. They’d had fun, scouring the clover field for four-leafs while helping to weed. Yoshida had chuckled when Akira declared he’d found the first one. The others had glared, in their good-natured way.

“And it wasn’t made with those chemicals, was it?” the boy asked, approaching slowly. Still wary, but eyeing the clover now as Akira twirled it between his fingers.

“As far as I know,” Akira told him. “It’s a new mixture. I couldn’t get the details on it, but I’m sure it doesn’t have any.”

The boy humphed. He still took the clover, looking it over for spots of rot or wilt. It was in surprisingly good shape for being stuck in Akira’s suit pocket for days, and the boy nodded.

“Alright,” he said, and handed it back.

Akira took it, stared for a long moment—was there something wrong with it after all? Was the stem too short, the leaves too uneven?—but then the boy called to him from the wall, where the door was still open and waiting.

“Give it to her yourself,” the boy said. “But you’re leaving that suit in here. I don’t need you tracking—whatever—all around anymore. I barely managed to fix the damage you did last time.”

“Last time?” The door whizzed shut behind him; Morgana, left with nothing but a pat on the rump, complained audibly, his whine muffled by the door.

The boy watched him shimmy out of his suit, his skin-tight underclothes transparent with sweat and clinging in all the wrong places. “You can’t just dig up roots like that,” the boy said, as Akira piled all his things in a corner, ARM belt on top. “Some of these plants date back to before my mother’s mother, and others to _her_ mother’s mother. Needless to say, they’re very delicate. Very susceptible to any change in environment, no matter how small. Do you really think Revive Fruits can be grown out on Filgaia proper anymore? They can’t. I doubt they ever will be, no matter how well the Ark’s cultivation plans work. The climate will have changed too much for them to thrive.”

Akira nodded, shivering.

“You’re wondering why I’m suddenly trusting you.”

Akira blinked. “No,” he said, though he was. The last time they’d seen each other he’d lectured the boy on proper suit maintenance, and they’d scrubbed their hands raw working at bits and flecks of mold until Akira had thrown his hands in the air, declared several filters unsalvageable, and made him swear he wouldn’t wear it until he got replacements.

(Said replacements were in one of Morgana’s saddlebags, carefully cushioned against any kind of jostling. Hopefully Morgana wasn’t sitting on them.)

“Unfortunately,” the boy sighed, opening the garden door, “I’m in need of another pair of hands. Do you see that vine, over there? In the corner?”

“That thick one?” It was almost as thick as Akira was, and its leaves were as big as both of his hands splayed side by side. Water dripped off one, then another, down and down, to the floor.

“Do you see how it’s grown so close to the ceiling?”

“You want to trim it down so it doesn’t choke up your sprinklers,” Akira guessed. He could imagine something as thick as that doing so easily, without any thought to the other plants in the garden. As if a plant could think.

“Precisely,” said the boy, with a satisfied nod. “However, the ground in the corner isn’t stable. You’ll secure the ladder while I trim it. You can give your gift afterward.”

Akira tucked the clover behind an ear. “Sure thing.”

The thing was, he didn’t expect just holding a ladder to be so hard. It was slick with moisture, and his grip slipped more times than he could count. Every time the boy shifted to get at a piece of vine from a different angle, the whole thing wobbled, and the sharp retort he received left his head spinning. The boy had a voice nearly as commanding as a crack of long-forgotten thunder, the kind Akira had only heard in the Ark’s videos of storms surging over the sea, over the land, and high above the mountains.

If Akira had started the whole thing wet and shivering, he ended it drenched and with a couple of whacks to the head, courtesy of falling vine pieces. By the time they were done he was well-acquainted with what it felt like to have water running into his eyes and dripping down his face in streams and not having his suit screaming at him about the water loss. If he hadn’t gotten practice in at the bathhouse in Humphrey’s Peak, he might have stood there, amazed as the water ran tracks down his face. He was really just cold.

He checked for the clover—still there, thank the gods—and watched the boy strip the leaves off the vines and heave everything into separate piles. “This vine,” he said as he worked, “isn’t nearly as old as some of the other plants here. It had adapted to the scarcity of water by the time my mother planted it; now, I have to trim it twice a month before it makes a nuisance of itself on the ceiling. It just means more Antidotes to go around, I suppose.”

Akira fingered the broad, waxy leaves. “These are Antidotes?”

“You used to have to chew them whole for any effect to take.” The boy flapped one at him; it was so enormous it couldn’t hold it’s own weight and drooped like a sullen child. “With ones as big as these, all I need to do is dry them, then crush them into powder. They’re just as effective, and aren’t nearly as bulky to carry.”

“So you sell them to the traders at Baskar for coin,” Akira said. Several towns they’d been through had the powdered Antidote stocked on their shelves; Akira supposed it was because only a pinch or two mixed into food or water cured just about every kind of monster poison the typical man came into contact with.

Then he remembered the prices of powdered Antidote.

“And let me guess,” the boy said, “they then turn around and sell them for three times as much to grocers and general sundries stores, who then are forced to sell them at six times as much to eke out a profit?”

“Well,” Akira muttered, “not always six times…”

The boy barked out a short laugh. “Ten times, then. Or perhaps fifteen? How exorbitant. All the money in the world won’t matter if there’s no food to spend it on.”

Except he couldn’t know just how expensive simple gruel was becoming. With every year, with every new crop failure, with the failure of last year’s batch to successfully germinate once more—no one had very much choice in what to eat anymore, in those smaller settlements, where the only residents were the old folk, the ones who couldn’t bare to leave their homes and lives and all they’d ever known to venture out for better prospects somewhere else. Akira and his team had buried the last resident of Ballacks Rise a few years ago; there had been no one else, no one who even passed through, to do it.

… Everywhere except Humphrey’s Peak, where the wheat took ages to grow but did, where Yoshida had teams of children and the underemployed pick the seeds out of the stalks for next year’s crops, where the water was oddly plentiful enough to permit excess fields, even ones of clover.

The boy sobered quickly. “I’m sorry. That was—everyone is eking out a living. Even I tire of what few staples I can grow here; I can’t imagine what it must be like, eating the same thing, day in and day out, out of necessity…”

 _Don’t brag_ , Akira almost said, but took a deep, calming breath instead. The boy traveled more than the average person, sure, but that didn’t mean he was an expert Drifter. The only place he knew outside of this mountain was Baskar Colony. He couldn’t know how bad it was everywhere else.

So he did what he did best. He said, “Oh, it’s awful. The other day my bowl of rice tried to eat me,” and stared the boy in the eye with as serious a look as he could muster.

“I—oh?” the boy said, at a loss. “It—it did what?”

“It tried to eat me.”

The boy gave him a once-over: shivering with chill, corded muscles rippling—even Akira knew he looked good, Hifumi had never shut up about it—his underclothes as thin as rags and sopping wet. He paused on the scars along his arms and legs, the fire burns and acid splashes and poison pricks alongside hatchet slashes and spike scratches and the piercings of a series of bullet holes.

Just because the Gobs were the primary squatters of old, abandoned towns and buildings didn’t mean that they didn’t occasionally run into other groups of Drifters or the homeless who’d been run out of town. Just because they were all human didn’t mean they talked it out civilly.

“I—well,” the boy said, struggling to regain what little composure he’d lost, “I suppose it’s a good thing you won, then.”

“Yeah,” Akira said. “It was the chemicals, really. Gave it that extra kick. Really nasty stuff.”

The boy nodded, solemn as the grave, and said, “I knew it.”

* * *

— _and though the power of magic that flows through the land may be diminishing, recent studies have found in pockets the life force that originally—_

He turned the page. Behind him, Makoto grunted. “You can wait for your turn,” Akira said.

“Those recent studies must be hundreds of years old by now,” she said, heedless of his words. “Do you think it’s possible that reading something this old will help, Akira?”

“No,” he said. In truth, he’d picked it out of the boy’s library mostly because the title was interesting: On the Properties of Magic as Defined by Proto-Galactic Colonies.

He was half-sure it was a joke. Proto-galactic? Who wrote—and believed—junk like that?

Makoto shook her head with a slight smile. Akira bookmarked the page and shut the book, and they appreciated the creak of old leather-and-glue bindings for a moment. Makoto said, “Another loan from that paramour of yours?”

“Naturally,” he said, running one gloved hand across the cover. Most of the gilt lettering had fallen off—Akira hoped that, with a title as presumptuous as that, the cover was a later addition—so all that remained was the faint, imprinted shadow. He supposed years in the sun didn’t help much, either.

“He must really enjoy your company,” she said, tucking hair behind an ear.

“Ann’s a bigger chatterbox than I thought,” he said.

“Oh, you know.” Makoto sat; her knee brushed his. “Us girls, we do talk to one another. It’s hard not to sometimes.”

“Only sometimes?”

Makoto, too? First Yusuke, then Ann… Akira hadn’t gotten the chance to spend much more time with either Ryuji or Futaba, lately, so if they were acting differently, too…

He and Yuuki had been fifteen and dumb. He and Hifumi had been sixteen and a little less so. Now he was seventeen, and what felt like half his team was tripping head over heels over him, and they were all supposed to be responsible paragons of Ark maturity.

It was a little much, if he was honest.

“I’d tell you all the grisly details, but I doubt you’ll find it very interesting. Ann can be very, ah, explicit at times.”

So they were venting. Ann made it no secret what she’d do if she ever saw Kamoshida again, but she must have been dumbing it down for the guy’s sake. Akira winced.

“Although she did tell us about what you both talked about the other day,” Makoto went on, now with a faint blush on her cheeks. “Did—did you mean it? That if we want something, all we need to do is ask?”

“I don’t think I’m ready to seriously date someone, if that’s what you’re going for,” Akira admitted, tracing a crack in the leather cover. “He’s just starting to open up a little. I want to be there for him, more than I am now. Trying to commit to anyone else would stretch me too thin.”

“At least you’re aware,” she said, then asked, “You don’t feel as if you’re stretched too thin now?”

He thought, briefly, of the garden. Of plucking the four-leaf clover from behind his ear and planting it in the same corner he’d originally searched through, like an apology. Of patting down the soil with his bare hands and feeling the sting of tears in his eyes— _this is what we could have had; this is what ou_ _r_ _lives could have been filled with_ —as a scheduled downpour from the sprinklers drenched him further.

He thought of having the vine pieces shipped to Humphrey’s Peak, for testing as a fertilizer component. Of going back to the boy’s farmhouse and eating crisp radishes fresh from the earth. Of Morgana’s tongue lapping up every bit of detritus the boy didn’t need clogging up his garden storage.

If the boy had asked him to stay, at that very moment, he would have. Instead he’d let Akira pick a new book from his shelf and sent him on his way.

“No,” he said, wondering what his face looked like, if it had softened the way he felt it do at times. “But, it sounds like you’re ready to ask for something. As long as it’s not commitment, I’m game.”

“You should be careful who you say that to,” Makoto chided, eyes drifting to Yusuke in the corner, scribbling on his Ark-issued tablet. They all had one, although Akira tended to leave his in his quarters, preferring the hands-on approach.

Yusuke preferred it too, but knew necessity won over desire any day.

“He’s been busy with a project of his. You know how he gets.”

She nodded. They tended to have to plan their ‘scheduled’ outings in between Yusuke’s various projects, as once he sunk into his artist’s fugue, it was hard to snap him out of it. If it wasn’t for how strong he was, they would have left him behind, more often than not, but both Akira and Makoto were willing to wait an extra day or two—or leave a day or two early—to appease his odder habits.

Akira could barely remember what Yusuke had looked like that night. Begging vaguely with his eyes, shivering a bit from the chill, his skin luminous in the moonlight…

Everything, he thought, happened under the soft glow of the moon.

“Well, I won’t say I haven’t been thinking about it,” she said, at length. “Part of me thinks we’re still too young to worry over things like commitment. Even Sis isn’t married yet, and she has the rest of the human resources team breathing down her neck. I feel bad for her some days.”

“I can’t imagine it,” Akira admitted. Sae seemed so young—closer to his and Makoto’s age, a far cry from her twenty-eight years. “Do you think they’ll force her to make a decision?”

Makoto shook her head. “If they do, she quits. She has a place to go all planned out, but she won’t tell me where. And if she quits—”

“We lose a lot of valuable partners,” he finished. “Sae has quite the following. Any town she makes a home in would be lucky to have her. Her associates would be out of their minds to push her.”

“Right,” Makoto said, staring at the book. She smoothed down her skirt for the third time since sitting down; her hand brushed his leg this time and paused there, as if she was startled by the heat. “Honestly, I’m not sure I’d want that either. Or just yet. We’ve been so focused on our duties that it’s hard to find the time for anything else, and…” She shook her head.

“You can tell me.”

“After Kamoshida, would it be appropriate? You’re our leader. You have to be… impartial on certain things. If anyone caught wind of it, all they’d have to do is spin lies in the right ear and you’d be down in the vat room as well. I… don’t want that.”

“You’re that worried?”

“Yes,” she said, simply. “You don’t deserve to be there, adjusting dials and levers for the rest of your life. You deserve to be free. So… even though I’ve thought about it—even though we’ve all thought about what it would be like, keeping you by our sides—I can give that up, if it means knowing you aren’t here, confined and miserable.”

So it really wasn’t just Ann and Yusuke, then. Had his whole damn team been spending their days, wishing for what he couldn’t give them anymore? “Is that why you didn’t kick up a fuss, all those months ago?”

Stealing a Baskar horse and riding off in the night—it was a stupid thing to do. She should have stopped him; she had every right to, as his second-in-command. But she hadn’t.

“Yes,” she admitted. “I thought if it was a lie and you didn’t come back, well, we all knew it was coming sooner or later. But then you did, and I didn’t know what to think.”

“I wouldn’t abandon you like that.”

“You took the skimmer, Akira,” she hissed under her breath. “You could have died at any point on that journey. What was I supposed to say to Shido if you didn’t come back? What was I supposed to say to _Sojiro_?”

“Oh,” he said, feeling foolish. Childish, almost. A paramour was one thing; a suicidal sand surf was another. For all any of them knew, Akira had left them and gone for next to no reason.

“And after, I took a long, hard look at myself,” she kept going, twisting the knife further. “What was I doing, falling for an idiot boy without a shred of decency? What was I doing, falling in love with a man who’d sooner throw his life away on a whim? And when you said you’d found a lover, I just—I thought—I thought, oh, that’s all it was? All that worrying I did, all those explanations I’d planned out, and it was all because of some—some _fling_?”

She wasn’t crying, he was quick to note. She wasn’t crying, but her voice had gone icy around the edges, and it shook with barely-contained fury. Her hand on his leg was a fist. Instinct was telling him to hold it, to pull her down from whatever high she was building to, gently. Reason was telling him to wait it out; she’d been holding onto this for months. He was long overdue a lecture.

“I know that’s not what it was now, but, at the time—Akira, I was so angry. We could have lost you. We could have—and we wouldn’t have known. Wouldn’t have had the chance to say goodbye. That’s all we want, that chance. You should know the feeling.”

Right, because he and Makoto had been friends ever since the day his parents disappeared into the sands. Her dad had helped raise him until he, too, became a victim of the wasteland. He and Makoto would always stand at the docks—Makoto hugging until her arms gave out, Akira settling for a simple pat on the head—to tell him goodbye, because every time might be his last, and then it was.

Yes, he knew the feeling.

“And I know you didn’t mean to do it to upset us, but that’s what happened. It upset us. Ryuji and Futaba especially; do you have any idea what you mean to them?”

 _Futaba came out of her room for_ you _, you dork._ “No,” he said.

But maybe he should ask. Maybe he should give them the time they wanted so desperately. Maybe it all would come out on its own if he stopped to show that he did, in fact, still think about them from time to time.

“We’ve known each other since we were kids,” Makoto said. “I’ve seen the way you linger, sometimes, when we’re out. Like you’re trying to soak in the sand and sky for as long as possible. Ann, and Haru, and Yusuke—they’ve seen it too. They can let you go. You don’t mean as much to them.”

Bullshit, he thought, thinking once again of Yusuke’s gaze on that night in Humphrey’s Peak. It had been so full of longing. Akira wondered how long he’d had the question on the tip of his tongue— _why do you have to go? Don’t. Don’t go, or take me with you._

Ann, too, gripping his hand tight over an old chessboard. How she didn’t dare to look at him.

“I’m sorry,” Akira said. “I don’t think I can help it.”

“Meaning you could if you tried?”

“If _you_ tried,” he corrected. “If you asked me not to go, I’d have to seriously consider it for a few years—and who knows what would happen by then? Maybe Shido’ll have a heart attack and Sojiro will take his place.”

“Sojiro would need a few more credentials to do that,” Makoto said, with a laugh. “But I’d never ask you to stay. I like you the way you are, stupid boy and all, and if that means having to watch you walk off into the sands one day, knowing that you’ll never come back… I will.”

“You will, huh.”

She nodded. “Yes, I will. It’ll hurt—every loss does—but I will.”

“You’ll have to be there for everyone when I do, then.”

“Yes,” she said, in a weaker voice, weaker than he’d ever heard her. “I will.”

“Good,” he said.

It wasn’t until she left that he realized: he was going to leave the Ark one day. It was no longer a question of _if_ —Shido was still young, and Akira disagreed with far too many of his policies to actively endorse them—and it had never been a question of _if_. It had ceased to be a question the moment his parents left him behind. It had ceased to be a question the day he was born, to a wide-open sky and an endless horizon.

If he sat a bit too close to Yusuke as he fiddled with his tablet, Yusuke didn’t complain.

* * *

He wasn’t sure what was worse: Makoto’s clear anger, or Futaba’s crying face. They sat next to each other on her bed, Futaba’s tablet shining between them as they took turns playing some old game. Akira wished he’d see this much fruit in a single lifetime.

“This is my fault,” she said.

“That’s not true,” he argued.

“It is,” she insisted, with a vicious swipe of her finger. “It _is_. I’m the one who told you about it, even if you were the one who decided to go investigate. It’s my fault.”

“It’s not,” he said, taking over as she wiped her eyes. “Futaba, it’s not. It’s who I am. It was going to happen, whether I found anything or not.”

“But this soon?” she asked.

“It’s only been a few months, and I’m not planning on leaving just yet.”

What was another year or two gradually learning the secrets of the garden? What was another year or two under Shido’s thumb?

“But—”

“Futaba.”

She winced. He felt a twinge of guilt for raising his voice, but she wasn’t listening.

“Futaba,” he said, softer, “I know I was determined before. I know I bothered you, coming by every day to sit outside your door and talk at it. But you heard every word, didn’t you?”

Wordless, she nodded. Fresh tears dripped down her cheeks, and he prodded at the screen to cover up the urge to wipe them away.

Not Futaba. Not anybody.

“I meant every one. How blue the sky is, what it’s like to watch a pod of sandfish break the surface of the sandsea, and the people. How they can still smile despite how hard their lives are; how they can keep fighting on a world that’s had enough; how they can still call it home. We’re a long way from who we were when we first landed here, and it’s time we gave something back to the earth that raised us, not caring who we were.”

“Fancy way of saying you’re gonna go off and die,” she said.

“But you agreed with it, didn’t you?”

Futaba sniffed. Her head hung low, hair forming a curtain that blocked her from view. “Mom said the same thing. That we gotta give back to the planet, that it’s only right. Maybe that’s why all of the Ark’s new seeds and stuff aren’t working.” She shook her head. “But then she did go off and die. She died right in front of me. And—you know what she looked like, for the split second before the sands overtook her?”

“What?” he asked.

“She was happy.”

Futaba glanced over at the little shrine in the corner of her room. Just about every picture she could get of her mother was crammed onto the walls—old newspaper clippings, the ink gray with age; a handful of sketches Yusuke had done for her on the backs of ruined pieces of paper; Wakaba’s badge hung from a nail, her glossy, impassive face staring back—and on the shelves in between were old pens and pencils she’d used out on the field; her clipboard, broken in half; an old pair of glasses; a chewed tablet stylus.

“She was being ripped apart, but she was smiling for my sake,” Futaba said, shaking now with yet more tears. Akira wondered if they would ever stop, if Futaba would ever cease to mourn.

No, she wouldn’t.

“She was smiling so my last memory of her wouldn’t be so sad,” she stuttered. “She was smiling. The planet she loved so much was killing her, and she was _smiling_.”

He wondered what his parents looked like, when the sands came and took them, or if they did at all. Maybe they were lucky enough to make it to a town before dying. Maybe they were rotting away at the bottom of a dungeon, the stink of their corpses clouding the air.

He’d never know.

“She told me something too, but I—I was never that great at reading lips, and maybe if she hadn’t she wouldn’t have died so quickly. I wish I knew what it was.” She sniffed again, louder, wetter. “What she said. I wish I knew what she said.”

“I do, too.” Though Akira hadn’t been a member of Wakaba Issiki’s final mission, he’d mourned her. She’d been one of the few adults to talk to him, to take him seriously. After her funeral, when Futaba had shut herself up, Akira had taken it upon himself to help her.

Futaba clung to his arm, and he stared at the shrine, game forgotten. At least Futaba had photos and sketches; all Akira had was the memory of looking up at his parents as they turned to watch him catch up, their faces obscured by the sun. They’d seemed so impossibly tall back then, tall enough to touch the sky.

But it wasn’t true. The only ones who could breach the clouds were long dead.

“Why did she want to come here?” Futaba asked. “Was it because of her research? Was it because of me? Was it both?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Any strides made into regaining their agriculture would be a boon for the next generation. No one would have to eat vat-grown rice ever again. No one would have to choose between giving enough food to their children or eating enough to get through the next day.

He said, “But I do know she loved you. She made sure you were safe first, didn’t she?”

“She made sure Sojiro made sure I was safe first,” Futaba corrected. “She didn’t—if she cared, she wouldn’t have dragged her feet! She would have run faster! She would have made it!”

Akira shut his eyes as she cried, “She’d still be here!”

“I know,” he said, at a loss for anything else.

Sometimes it was better to let her cry it out. If she wore herself out doing that, she’d be less angry at him. Her grip was tight on his arm, and she pulled him in close, closer than she’d ever dared before.

“I don’t want you to go! After Mom, I—I don’t want to lose anyone else! I want you to stay where I can see you, where I know you’re safe!”

“Even if I’m not happy?”

Futaba beat his chest, screaming wordlessly. The door slid open: Makoto, concern heavy on her shoulders, marching over to pull Futaba away. Ann drifted in after her, her hair spilling over her shoulders in loose tangles.

“We’ll take care of her,” Ann told him, and pushed him to the door—and as much as he wanted to stay, he couldn’t. If he did, he’d never be able to leave.

He paused in the doorway. “Futaba,” he said, straining to be heard over her wails, “I think she said she loved you. I think she said you had to keep living.”

His words made her wail harder. Ann gave a sympathetic look and shut the door in his face.

“How unexpected,” Hifumi said, from her spot a few feet away.

Futaba’s wailing was muffled through the door. Ann was trying for soothing and calming, but whether it worked, Akira didn’t want to stay and find out. “Walk with me?” he asked.

Hifumi started down the hall. “You’re still as flighty as ever,” she remarked.

“Only when I don’t have my mind set—and it’s Futaba. I’d never.”

“So you say,” she said, throwing a small smile over her shoulder.

“I was serious with you.”

“I’m aware,” she said, and turned back to the hall. Then she shook her head. “No, I know you were. I was, too. Work just got in the way.”

“For both of us.”

She nodded. “For both of us.”

Before they broke up, Akira had just been promoted to survey team captain. Hifumi had just started her apprenticeship with the Chief of Security. Their hours had become far more grueling than before, and the few times they’d had to meet up were further broken by the disparity of their schedules.

“Have you thought on it anymore?”

To get back together? “No,” Akira said. “I gave you my answer. It hasn’t changed and it never will.”

“I see. At least you haven’t changed there.”

“I’m surprised you asked.”

“It’s not that hard to believe that I worry for you, is it?”

“Worry? No.”

They stopped in front of her door. “Then why?” she asked.

“Because it would end the same way,” he said. “We’d have a good couple of months, and then work would get in the way, and then when we’d be seeing each other once or twice a month, we’d call it off. It was fun, but it’s not what I want anymore.”

Hifumi chuckled. “You sound so grown up now. It’s only been a year.”

“A year’s a long time.”

A year of official scouting missions. A year of not having to pay for sandship repairs out of the team’s earnings. A year of being recognized as legitimate, instead of that ragtag bunch of teenagers trying to get themselves killed.

“Although,” she added, “if there’s one flaw of yours, it’s that you give too much of yourself. A relationship where you’re always on top just isn’t feasible, Akira. You have to be willing to let your partner take care of you sometimes, too.”

“I did that once. Look how it turned out,” he said, stretching his arms wide—but Hifumi, like most of his team, hadn’t been around as long as Makoto had. They weren’t privy to his childhood nightmares or his even more childish daydreams, ones where his parents were alive and well and flourishing as Drifters, or ones where they’d settled down in some town his team wasn’t assigned to.

“Akira,” she said, her face going soft with pity. “Who—”

“The ones who mattered to me the most,” he said, before she could finish. “Maybe that’s why. It’s too hard to let anyone else in if they’re just going to betray me.”

“Have you talked to one of the doctors about it?”

He smiled, and felt the way it strained at his cheeks. He was tired of thinking about his parents for the day—maybe even for the month, maybe for the whole year. Between Futaba and the Elw boy, he’d been ruminating nonstop.

 _I just wish_ , he thought, then stopped it forcefully. There was no wishing with his parents. They were dead and gone. He knew it deep in his bones.

That didn’t make it hurt any less.

* * *

The port town of Jolly Roger stank with smoke; steel crates passed by overhead as Akira made his way down an alley, and the hiss of cooling engines echoed around the scrap-metal buildings. Fox grunted as his katana banged the wall; Akira pushed on ahead, past stinking piles of garbage that could be fertilizer elsewhere, past rusted steel crates left to meet their demise, past even a puddle of something thick and gooey and mildly concerning. Queen and Noir watched the ship while Skull and Panther arranged for rooms at the saloon, and here Akira was, skirting past something that might have been an old wooden chair finally snapped into pieces.

What a waste.

And what a waste for Chihaya to be sitting at some flimsy metal table, looking for all the world like a stray breeze would bowl her over before it ever touched the cards piled on top of it.

She perked up when she saw him. “Joker! It’s so good to see you again!”

“I’d say likewise, but.” He gestured at the table and her scattered cards. There was fresh dirt still ground under his fingernails, and the smell of rancid oil was getting through his mask filters, eliminating what remained of green leaves and fertile soil and the first flowering buds of a plant the Elw boy didn’t want to name.

Somehow, Chihaya saw it anyway. She pulled her cards close to shuffle them and said, “So something good _did_ happen! I’ve been seeing stagnation in your future for so long I was starting to worry.”

“You were worried? I’m the one who’s worried.”

He most certainly did not slam a hand on her table. He was Joker; he was better than this.

“You’re the one who’s out here on some back alley corner and not in the saloon I set you up in,” he reminded her, and she focused on the tubing sliding down his suit front, the pockets of space where it slid out from beneath zippers and buttons. Not everything could hide all the time. “What happened? All Lala would tell me is that you had a disagreement with Ohya.”

“She drinks like a fish and smells like one,” Chihaya said, laying cards out on the table. She placed one directly on his splayed hand and it shivered in a breeze. “A little bit of alcohol I’d understand, but as much as she drinks? That’s bad taste.”

“Indeed,” Fox agreed. “I doubt there’s been a time we’ve met where she hasn’t been inebriated.”

“ _And_ it’s bad for her, and for Lala’s business!” She flipped cards. Akira didn’t pretend to know what some of them meant. “How can Lala sell her booze if Ohya’s drinking it all up before noon? Don’t she know how precious that grain is? So I said to Lala, I ain’t putting up with no wastrel, and I moved out here.”

“But you still go back to the saloon to sleep, right?” he asked. Jolly Roger was famous not only for being Filgaia’s lone port town, but also for it’s red-light district, the shuttered shops and storefronts that opened onto glittering parlors and drug dens and brothels when the sun sank. Akira didn’t care for the gaudiness of the prostitutes or for the age of some of them.

There were worse places than the Ark to be abandoned, he supposed.

“Oh, sure,” Chihaya said. “Once I know Ohya’s out hunting for a scoop, or when Lala sends Max to come and fetch me. He’s a good guy, Max. Sweet thing.”

Poor thing, she meant. Max’s whole family had been killed by Gobs right in front of him. Lala had mentioned that he hadn’t been left in one piece, either, in more than one way, and that he was lucky to be alive at all.

“The one who hides in the corner all night rather than serve?” Fox asked.

“He don’t like being teased,” Chihaya defended, shooting Fox a withering glare. “Bad enough he’s got scars what hurt him still; he don’t need people poking fun at him neither.”

“Lala’d put him in the back if she could, but he wants to be useful,” Akira said. “We all know it’s not his fault.”

The zippers on Fox’s suit jingled as he adjusted his collar and stared down the lane. There was a difference between being forced because there was nothing else, and doing so because it was the only way to feel even a tiny bit better—and because there was nothing else. No one besides Lala would take pity on Max; no one else would sit him down and listen and give him hard solutions.

“‘Sides, the sailors are too scared of me,” Chihaya went on. “They say I’m a witch. That I’ll curse them if they so much as look at me funny—but the girls and boys up the street, they bring me plenty of business. Easier’n having to walk all the way to the saloon, it is, and I read the cards cheap for ‘em.”

“Yeah?” Akira said, deflating. Chihaya wasn’t in any danger on her little corner. She was fine, even if he didn’t like her choice of locale. “And how much is this going to cost me?

“For you? It’s free,” she stated. “I’ve got a special discount for dashing young men what save my life, y’know. I’d be Gob food by now if you hadn’t.”

Her fingers hovered over the last card, the one on his hand. She looked for permission—it wasn’t right to touch her clients, even the ones getting free readings—and he stared down at pretty purple eyes. Her hair was the wrong color, however, for the Drifter that had bought the Bartlett’s book.

He nodded; she flipped it quick, then stared down at the cards.

“You’re working steadily toward your goal,” she read. “Whether you reach it or not, however, isn’t up to you. Be honest with the ones around you, and…”

She looked sad as she turned back to him. “…Put your fate in their hands.”

_You have to be willing to let your partner take care of you sometimes, too._

“…Right,” he said, at length. It was one thing for Hifumi to say it out of concern; it was another to hear it from Chihaya’s mouth. It was practically a guarantee.

_You’ll fail if you can’t trust._

“I’ll remember it,” he said, and took his hand from the table. Chihaya grabbed the cards and shuffled them back into her deck; Fox jingled again with movement, shifting on his feet.

“But, actually,” he added, “you see a lot of people come this way, Chihaya?”

“Oh, sure.” She nodded. “Sailors, mostly, but sometimes the Drifters stop in. Fancy folk from New Little Twister or the big earners from the arena.”

“You ever see somebody with eyes like yours?”

Fox started and stared at him; Chihaya glanced back down at her table, one hand going to her eyes. The sheer damn impossibility of two people having the same rare color was too poignant to ignore.

“I—no,” she said, after a while. “These were—they’re marks. Back home, before everything went to hell in a handbasket, everybody said they were a mark of blessing from the gods. They said I was divine.” Her face crumpled. “After, they said I was a demon.”

And then Akira and his team had found her, wandering the wasteland, a pack of Gobs cresting a nearby dune. They’d never asked for an explanation, and Chihaya had never given one.

“‘N they said if they killed me they’d be cursed, so they set me loose in the middle of nowhere. Said if’n I came back they’d do the deed, too, and I didn’t want to die. So I went. I’d never even seen a map before. I woulda walked right over some cliff into the sea o’ sand and wouldn’ta= have known it. But now I’ve got Lala and Max—and Ohya too, I guess. People come to me for readings all the time, so I pull in my share. S’only fair.”

Only fair that she earn her keep and use her power in one fell swoop. Akira supposed it was a lot like scratching an itch—if she ignored it, it would only get worse and more persistent until her skin jumped with need. “Lala wouldn’t boot you out onto the streets for not pulling your weight, Chihaya,” he said.

She nodded, still unhappy. “I know. But it makes me feel better. I pull more than Ohya does, ‘n I don’t drown myself in drink, ‘n me and Max, we’re best friends, now. I like it here. ‘N it’s all ‘cause you stopped to help some nobody out in the desert, so—I’ll keep a lookout. Lots of Drifters want their fortunes read, if’n I give ‘em a discount, they’ll come in droves.”

“You don’t have to go that far,” he said. “It was just a whim. Thought I’d ask.”

“Oh,” she said, this time more unhappy that she couldn’t be useful. Then she perked up. “But—but I’ll still do it! ‘N when I find ‘em, I’ll remember their face, ‘n ask where they’re headed! Then I can tell ya!”

He nodded and left with a wave of the hand. When they were nearly back at the saloon, Fox asked, “Is that wise, Joker?”

“Probably not,” Akira said. “It’s really just a whim and my own curiosity. Two people with purple eyes—I thought they might be related somehow. Turns out I was wrong.”

It was a stupid idea, anyway, wanting to meet with the mysterious Drifter the Elw boy called an uncle, the one who gave him books and a proper desert suit and had likely helped camouflage the garden. Akira had wondered aloud how the Elw boy trimmed the vine before Akira helped him, and he’d turned his gaze to the bookcase for just a moment before saying he’d done it himself and fallen on his ass more times than he could count.

The image, while funny, had still prompted a lecture never to do so again. The boy had grudgingly agreed.

“It is a rather odd color,” Fox mused. “Madarame would likely have seen someone—if he were still alive, that is. We traveled quite often. I’m sure he would have heard of someone like that.”

“Sure he would have,” Akira muttered. Fox had never said what business Madarame had engaged in, though Akira doubted it was human trafficking. Fox would surely have known, would surely have said something before blindly following Akira back to the Ark. Something art-related, if the bundles of parchment and paper and bottles of ink and pencils and brushes Fox had been forced to tote around were any indication.

Fox heard him. “Madarame was long-lived. A rarity in today’s age, where men aren’t likely to live past forty. There are many things he would have seen in those years, though he never deigned to idly share.”

“He never talked to you?”

“Ah—well. No,” he admitted. “Not the way I’ve heard Boss and Oracle, at the very least. He was a very private man.”

“Then there’s no point in wondering about it, is there,” Akira said. “He’s dead. Any knowledge he didn’t care to share is dead with him. If his secrets were so important to him he could take them to his grave, then that’s his problem, not yours.”

“You’re angry,” Fox observed bluntly.

Akira paused in the alley, right next to that stinking puddle. “And if I am?”

“Are you angry for me, yourself, or at Madarame?” Fox asked, letting the words dig in like the world’s dullest knife. Like a spoon, maybe. Akira wondered what was on the menu for dinner. “Or some combination of the three?”

Instinct told him to brush it off—how he was feeling wasn’t any of Fox’s business, and by now Akira knew it was more than likely to get back to the rest of the team—but Chihaya’s words rang in his ears: _put your fate in their hands_.

“That last one sounds right,” Akira said.

“And what do you wish to do about it, then? I can listen, if you’d like.”

Akira sighed. Baring his whole damn heart and soul was harder than he thought—as soon as the words left Fox’s mouth, he bristled. _No_ , his body screamed. _Not that. Anything but that._

Akira still managed to say, “It might take all night. You sure you have time?”

“For you? Always,” was the quick response.

Akira dared a step, suddenly determined to close the distance. He had wondered, after, whether Fox would have tasted like almonds and beet sugar and worry, and Akira craved, inexplicably, the sensation of his teeth sinking into flesh and bone. “We might do more than just talk, Fox,” he warned.

“Is that so?” Fox seemed so far away. Three inches was an awful lot of distance between them, and it was all Akira’s doing. He hadn’t given Fox what he wanted all those months ago, so the boy was drawing back, giving him room to love someone else. If only Akira did love someone else. If only it wasn’t a ruse. “And if I say no, I’d merely like to listen? What would you do then?”

“Maybe I talk better with my hands.”

“I believe you do just fine with your—oh, I see.” Fox stared at him, right down the fancy painted nose he’d put on his mask. Three inches really was a lot of distance. “Be that as it may, the answer is still no. I am my own person. I’ve the right to refuse.”

Akira chuckled and ducked away, back down the alley, past the stinking puddle. Something in his skin had started up—an itch he could feel but couldn’t scratch, an irritation so bone-deep it seemed to be fused with his very marrow, with the cells in his blood. “Then come with me. Maybe I’ll let something slip while I’m out hunting monsters. I’ve an urge to watch something die, today, and I haven’t shot in a while.”

“This is rather foolhardy behavior, Joker,” Fox said. He was probably pinging the group as they exited the alley, walked right past the saloon, and left the town gates.

Akira shrugged. The desert and the open, cloudless sky hovered, waiting. In a few hours both would be stained red, and with any luck, he would be too exhausted to notice.

(And he was, collapsing entirely on their way back to town. Fox draped him over one shoulder like the world’s unruliest sack of potatoes and wondered when things had ever gotten this bad, and how he could never have noticed. Joker was a Drifter. He held his fate in his own two hands—or so he believed, and now that he was being forced to recognize outside forces, he very clearly wasn’t happy.

Fox, under the blood-red sky of sunset, made up his mind.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole thing tried very, very hard to be polythieves, but... really doubting I can handle that right now, so a frustrated Akira who's reading way too much into everything is the best I can do.


	5. The Empress

“Akira! There you are, my boy!”

“Yoshida,” Akira said, waving his team off to the bathhouse. He was surprised to see Fox duck in with them, his tail grimy and in bad need of laundering, but the others made no fuss over it.

His back felt… odd, without Fox hovering behind for once.

Yoshida watched them go and nodded to himself. “Well, this works out perfectly. There’s someone who wanted to speak to you next time you were in town—privately, might I add.”

“We aren’t for hire, Yoshida,” Akira reminded him.

“Oh, I’m well aware.” He paused, as if struggling for words.

Yoshida? At a loss for words? Was the sky going to fall next?

“She wanted to give something to you,” he finally said, and took out a handkerchief to dab at the sweat on his face. “I believe she said it was for safekeeping. I’ve no idea what it could be—I tried to ask, but she refused to say. She said she’ll meet you in the graveyard. Hardly anyone goes there anymore.”

“I see,” Akira said, eyeing the hill the graveyard sprawled over, only the top visible from the town entrance: a massive, white marble mausoleum housing bones hundreds of years old, belonging to a family that had long since died out.

“Should I tell your team where you’ve gone, if you’ve yet to return by the time they’re done?” Yoshida asked, and Akira shook his head.

“Just tell them I’ll be back in time for dinner. If she wants to meet privately, I don’t want one of them storming the place looking for me.”

Yoshida smiled, nodded, and headed into the bathhouse to give the receptionist the message.

Akira went on down the street. In the daylight, Humphrey’s Peak was nearly blinding with energy. Children off from work for the day ambled along the street, chasing a ball. A gaggle of housewives scrubbed laundry by the well, chatting. A pair of househusbands did the same, clucking their tongues at stains.

“Why does he have to put that sauce on everything?” one of them asked, holding up a shirt to the light and sighing at the massive dark spot on the front.

Akira passed an old woman on a walk, a surly teenager walking her dog—some sort of mongrel breed that looked as if it took half its DNA from one of the monsters roaming the wasteland—and window washers on their way back to the well, their buckets clanging over their shoulders. There was the distant sound of running water, and once he was on the street leading to the graveyard he took a pause and listened, remembering sprinkler mist and fat drops and leaves pouring more water then he’d ever seen in his entire life on his head.

There was enough water in Humphrey’s Peak that it ran in streams through the sewers and pipes. Well-to-do families had working sinks in their homes; the bathhouse was a less a bathhouse and more a public meeting ground. Everyone came and went and not a one took the water for granted.

He still couldn’t believe it.

As he climbed up the hill, he looked down rows and rows of polished tombstones. The cracks and jags had been sanded down to smooth edges and the names worn off by wind and sand, but the woman down a lane still clutched a bouquet of clover and weeds, all scraggly, as he neared.

“Mrs. Bartlett,” he greeted with a bow.

“Sir Drifter,” was her response.

“You wanted to speak to me?”

“I did, yes,” she said, and split her bouquet in half and gave it to him. She turned to the tombstone in front of her. “Did you know, sir Drifter, that there was a time Humphrey’s Peak wasn’t as prosperous as it is today?”

“Not every place can be this lively all the time,” he said.

She shook her head. Wisps of hair fell out of her bun to frame her face; she placed her half of the bouquet down and patted it. “A long, long time ago—before you or I were born, before our parents or theirs or theirs before them—Humphrey’s Peak was just a spot on the map. I’ve the records at home to prove it. There was nothing to see, nothing to do, and so, nobody came. But nobody left, either. Not until my many-greats-grandfather decided to traverse the wasteland as a Drifter, making a name for himself as he searched for a way to reverse the planet’s slow decay. Even back then, they knew it was coming, and he did all he could to stop it.”

She paused, taking a shaky breath. “You know the team that assassinated your Ark’s leader? He was on that team. He was one of them.”

Akira eyed the gravestone—perfectly smooth, with no trace of any etchings. Not exactly an outlaw’s grave, but not part of the meticulous monotony of the others, either.

“When he died, his team brought him here. They buried him in the daytime, and placed flowers, and before they left they gave my many-greats-grandmother a gift. It was something they all agreed Humphrey’s Peak would need if the degeneration got any worse, but they planned to do all they could to fix it before their time was up. Can you guess what that gift was?”

Akira shook his head. A gift, from well over a hundred years ago? Something that would aid an entire town?

But as he shook his head he heard it again: the rush of running water, smooth over stones.

Even out here, in the graveyard, where it had no right to be?

“Yes,” she said. She pulled a plate from her pocket—the one from the bookcase, the one he’d stared at, whose fossil imprint was still as unrecognizable as the lettering on some of the tombstones. “Water, more abundant than we’d ever seen. It rushed through the sewers. It rained more often. What little crops we’d planted flourished and grew bigger than we’d ever known they could, and all because of this.”

“What is it?” he asked, nearly gagging on the taste of salt.

“A god itself,” she answered, then shrugged. “Or so I’m told. Take it.”

“You want me to—to _take_ it?” He goggled at her, at it, at the very idea that what she held so easily in one hand was a god. He could smash it into pieces in a heartbeat if he wished. It was hardly all-powerful.

“Yes,” she said, lips pursed. “The boy my husband and I told you about—the one with the odd coloring—he visited again. I saw him in the street and stopped to talk to him. I asked him over for tea, thinking I could ask him what he’d done with the book you’d asked after, and he—when he came, he went right to the bookshelf. ‘He’s getting restless,’ he said. ‘He won’t stand being cooped up for much longer.’ Then he offered to switch them—I’d get one that was ready to rest a while, and he’d take this one. They like traveling, apparently.”

“The… plate-things.” Akira stared at it. It kind of—maybe, if he squinted—looked like a turtle. “They… like traveling.”

“They’re gods, not chairs or—or lamps,” she said. “So I suppose they’d like to see the world every so often. And—and no one ever comes to visit, so no one is really going to know they’ve switched, least of all Winslow. He’s too invested in his work to notice much.”

“And the Drifter, he didn’t think it strange, that you wanted to hold onto it for a while longer?”

“Mayhap a bit,” she admitted, smoothing down her skirt with her free hand. “But he doesn’t ask questions. He said he’d let me think on it and be back in a month or two. So I’m afraid you don’t have very long to consider it yourself.”

Because Akira and his team would begin the month-long journey back to the Ark after their stay in Humphrey’s Peak, and they rarely traveled so far out in the first place.

“But it’s an heirloom,” he argued weakly, one hand already reaching out for it. Even through his gloves he could feel the power radiating off of it, the sheer force of an ancient tidal wave threatening to push him under the surface of the sea.

“Which just means it’s mine to give,” Mrs. Bartlett said, pressing it into his hand. Akira gasped, expecting that power to rush through him, but it didn’t. All he felt was the cool touch of the plate through his gloves, the surface worn smooth in spots, one turtle fin broken at the edge.

“And I’ll be getting a replacement,” she reminded him as he looked it over. “Earth, I think he said. Fertile soil, good for the crops. No doubt the mayor will think one of his new fertilizers is doing its job. I only hope it doesn’t stink.”

“The water won’t dry up if I take it?”

Mrs. Bartlett shook her head. “I don’t know how he knows it, but I was assured it wouldn’t. Something about the magic being anchored to the place for a while. I’ll tell him to be on the lookout for you; I’m sure he’ll be happy to give you details. But, ah, there was one thing…”

“The Ark,” Akira guessed.

“He won’t be happy to hear that you’re one of them, no,” she said. She fidgeted again, smoothing down her skirt, fingers catching on the lip of a pocket. “Though, I doubt he’d admit it. He’s a wanted man. The Ark never took the bounties off those assassins. I’m surprised he’s walking about as freely as he is, with nary a care in the world.”

 _I’m not happy to hear I’m one of them_ , Akira wanted to shout, but his thoughts caught on her words. Akira’s mystery Drifter was a wanted man. The Ark’s longstanding bounties on a group of assassins thought to be long-dead only made sense if it was done out of sheer spite…

… or if one of the assassins was particularly long-lived. Like the Elw boy.

Mrs. Bartlett, without a word, took a photo from her pocket. Age had tinted it to sepia tones and cracked the ink, but there was a man in one corner who looked a bit like her if Akira squinted, smiling like he was amused by a joke but not amused enough to laugh outright, and a Baskar man towering over the whole group by nearly a foot, his lips stretched into a wide grin, and a girl with her hair pulled back into a plait pulling at the scarf wrapped around the neck of a surly teenager, his scowl and stance dripping sheer hormonal anger. His hair was light— _Crowned by Fengalon himself!_ —but the ink had faded too much to glean out the color of his eyes.

“Purple as poison, they were,” she whispered into the sudden hush of the graveyard. “You’d know it, soon as you saw him. He holds such hate in his heart. You wouldn’t think it if you read one of my many-greats-grandfather’s journals, but he does. He hates. He hates us all.”

“He’s human,” Akira observed, noting his ears. Simple rounded human ears, like Akira’s.

“Apparently not human enough to die when he was s’posed to, like the rest of them,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “He’d be—he’d be hundreds of years old. He doesn’t look it—not then, and not now. You’ll know him if you ever spot him. You’ll know.”

Akira thought to ask about the journals—but she’d never part with them. They were too private, too personal, even for a man long dead, and besides, if the wrong person read over his shoulder at the wrong time, he’d be bringing the wrath of the Ark down on the little town of Humphrey’s Peak. Akira cared too much for the land that was clinging so tenaciously to life that he drowned the thought before he really knew it.

Instead, he drank in the sight of the boy in the photo, no older than Akira was. If he was anything like the Drifters in Sojiro’s day, he’d be parading about without a full mask—but even then the shock of hair would be enough. People remembered that kind of thing.

Lala would know, Akira thought, cursing his lack of foresight. He should have asked Lala if she’d ever seen the boy, not just Chihaya. She’d remember—she didn’t serve booze to minors, not even Drifter minors. The boy looked like someone who’d kick up a fuss if he didn’t get his shot of salt whiskey.

Akira sighed, leaning back and shoving the plate in his pocket with a wince. Maybe they’d stop by Jolly Roger on their way back to the Ark, and he could ask then, but for now… “You said this is your great-grandfather?” he asked, nodding to the tombstone and the spat of flowers.

“Yes,” Mrs. Bartlett said.

“I see,” Akira said, and shut his eyes against the glare of the sun as it began to set. “I’ve never paid my respects at a proper grave before”—he figured the mass grave of Kamoshida’s stupidity didn’t count—“so, could you show me? It can’t be as easy as just leaving flowers.”

Mrs. Bartlett was more than happy to. They parted as the first of the street lamps in town were being lit, Akira heading the one way and Mrs. Bartlett the other. He took a quick soak in the bathhouse, gathered up his team languishing in the water, and they headed to Yoshida’s for the night. Futaba clung to his arm the whole way there, blinking back sleep.

Akira couldn’t help the pat on the head he gave her. She ducked away from any further praise, falling back to cling to Makoto instead, and Akira was afraid to turn, afraid to learn what he’d find waiting on their faces. Surely not the same tired gazes as when they beached the sandship for the night; surely not the same relief of having a long, hot bath for the first time in months.

With every step, his fingers brushed the plate in his pocket. Arcane power seemed ready to jump at his command; it was so strange, after a lifetime fighting the hard way, that power could so readily be his. It had taken years and several migraines to synchronize with his ARM fully; the plate had connected to him within seconds.

It would be so easy to think that all the effort he’d put in so far was meaningless in the face of it, Akira ruminated over dinner. Yoriko, Yoshida’s wife, put her best foot forward hosting Akira and his team—Akira settled the niggling feeling in the back of his mind telling him that not even the Yoshidas could afford all of this food, not in such great amounts, not even for a night—and the table strained under plates and platters and bowls heaped with steaming piles: bread and potatoes, vegetables of every color, greens of every shade, berries with cream, corn on the cob. Ryuji exclaimed at the meat Yoriko pulled out of the oven after they’d piled their plates high, stared down at his own, and then proceeded to shovel in as much food as he could stomach all at once.

Akira laughed along with everyone else, noting Ann and Makoto’s disgust as Ann pulled the berry bowl closer. Yusuke licked the butter off his bread roll, prompting Futaba to roll her eyes and wonder aloud why he didn’t eat it straight out of the dish; Haru’s bliss at having a plateful of greens surpassed words. She dabbed at her eyes several times throughout the meal, taking the time to look around the table, at the things Humphrey’s Peak could grow but the Ark couldn’t, even with her family’s botanical expertise.

_Earth. Fertile soil, good for the crops._

The food almost turned to ash in his mouth. Akira chewed mechanically, swallowed with the help of a hefty gulp of ice water, and stared: more food than his team had seen in weeks, all spread out in one place. If the whole of Humphrey’s Peak ate like this on a regular basis, the Ark would notice. Just because the sandstorms disrupted their satellite feeds wouldn’t mean they wouldn’t eventually notice the expanding fields or the abundance of food.

He touched the—the crest, not a plate, it wasn’t divine enough a word for the god resting inside of it—crest in his pocket and could almost hear the call of water rushing in his ears. Futaba was staring at him; he drank more water and gave her a grin that she shakily returned.

He wasn’t ready to see this place razed to the ground for the secrets of its soil. Not now, not in five years or ten or twenty—not even a hundred years from now, when he was long dead and the only people who would remember him were dead, too, save for the boy in the garden.

Shido wouldn’t do that, he told himself as dinner wrapped up and they helped clean up. Yoriko packed away what little hadn’t been eaten into the icebox in the cellar, and Akira sat around with Makoto and Haru and took notes on where Yoshida needed some extra hands the next day as they shared a bowl of nuts. He had half a mind to mention the crest in the Bartlett’s house and the one in his pocket, half a mind to simply let the truth of it all hang out for all to see—but stopped his tongue every time. Haru and Makoto were loyal to the Ark, if not to Shido. They’d insist on testing it, monitoring it, taking their samples and collecting their data and then…

And then…

He didn’t know. All he did know was that Boot Hill had once stood tall and proud, a symbol of one tiny settlement standing on its own two feet against the decay of the planet, and now it was gone. It was nothing more than rubble and memory and a persistent sign promising safety and shelter that wasn’t there in the next ten miles.

No, he decided, biting his tongue. Not yet. Not ever, if he could help it.

It was late when they finished. The girls retreated to the second floor bedrooms; the attic where the boys slept was dark save for the flicker of a candle by Yusuke’s bedside as he sketched on his tablet. Akira sloughed off his shirt and pants and all but collapsed on his bed. A breeze drifted in through the window, cool and inviting.

He wasn’t sure how long he was asleep, just that one second he was enjoying the breeze and the scratch of Yusuke’s stylus, and the next he was jolting awake to thunder, far out on the dunes. One hand went to his belt—gone, being laundered with the rest of his suit, his ARM within reach on the nightstand but so distant from his muscle memory that it may as well have been on another planet. He sighed as another peal of thunder echoed through the room; Yusuke grunted in his sleep and rolled over, while Ryuji snored away, none the wiser.

Akira turned to the enormous window that took up almost an entire wall on its own: heavy clouds streaked with lightning, the sky an ominous purple, the very faint ring of moisture as a ghost rain began to fall over the dunes. He stared, transfixed, until the creaking of the floorboards alerted him to movement: Haru, having crept up the stairs in her nightgown, her penlight nearly blinding.

“Oh!” she cried softly as he winced at the light. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone else was awake.”

Akira grunted, sitting up more fully in bed. His voice was still thick with sleep as he asked, “Came to see the storm?”

“Yes,” she said, taking a seat by the window. Her eyes shone with unbridled joy; he thought he saw a tear drip down her cheek before she turned her head and hid it from view. “It’s lovely, isn’t it? The storm… the rain… this is how the planet is supposed to be.”

Lovely was one word Akira wouldn’t use to describe it. Terrifying, more like. One strike of a lightning bolt and you were more than fried; you were monster food, and sometimes you’d even still be alive to feel it. Humphrey’s Peak, with its history of storms, still had several active lightning rods around town. A streak in the night lit one up.

“Except the rain’s supposed to hit the ground,” Akira reminded her, “and not vanish into thin air.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, if it did? No more reliance on reclamation facilities. No more dependence on the Ark for hard-to-forge filters and desert suits. No more of their pressure to use their fertilizers or starve—and I know we work for them. I know we do. But pushing it the way we have just feels… wrong, to me.”

“They don’t have much choice,” he said. “Like you said, it’s take it or starve.”

She nodded. Her hair was tied up in a scarf, and it changed the angles of her face, made them sharper until it looked to be all planes and edges for shadows to flicker off of. There was no trace of the maniacal glee she occasionally let through, but then again, Akira wasn’t her enemy.

Not yet, anyway.

“How’s your father?” he asked.

“Oh, he’s well,” Haru said, turning back to the window and the storm. She raised her face to catch the breeze and the bitter mixture of rain and desert. “I was… worried, after his stroke. I know he didn’t take my rejection of Sugimura well, but I never thought he’d become so…”

Akira nodded as she struggled to find the words to describe him. Kunikazu Okumura had been a good man—a kind man—once, before rot had settled into his little town and he’d struggled to overcome it—and when it came to light that the little town didn’t have enough to pay the Ark, he offered his daughter’s expertise in lieu of payment. Shido had grudgingly accepted; Akira was half-sure it was because it would make him look benevolent, instead of hungry for as much power as he could grab.

Her father had been overjoyed to hear of her engagement to a prominent, rich family. No doubt the news of it falling through had hurt him in more ways than one.

Akira watched the storm instead. He was a no-name Drifter child and he always would be; there wasn’t any pressure on him to settle down with a girl and make a family. No one expected him to; Kamoshida had sneered, before that last disastrous trip, that Akira would likely die alone on the sands.

He thought briefly of Sae, still trying to make a name for herself in the Ark’s upper echelons, even as they tried to dumb down her intelligence, even as they tried to set her up with their sons and nephews. What did any of it matter, Akira thought, if Sae or Haru settled down and got married if the planet was still dying? What hope would the next generation have if all they inherited was the dust and dirt that could barely keep their parents fed?

“I, well,” Haru said, “I enjoy being on the team. I enjoy being useful to the Ark, too. One day we’ll make a breakthrough and—maybe then I’ll want to marry. I’ve always liked those weddings in books: more flowers than a chapel can hold; happy, smiling faces; plentiful food… I’d like that kind of wedding. I don’t care how long I’d have to wait for one like that. I won’t do so until I can have it.”

“You might be old and gray by then,” Akira teased.

“That doesn’t matter to me.” Haru’s voice was steel. The Okumuras had been an affluent family, once upon a time, and in showed in her posture, in the way she folded her hands in her lap, in her gentle, soft tones. Akira couldn’t help but think of a lamb being raised for the slaughter. “There are plenty of children depending on us. I’d rather help them than myself, or my father. I want to be more than just a prize waiting to be won.”

“Sure you’re a prize,” Akira said, and Haru looked to him, stunned. He ticked off his fingers: “You’re smart, you’re gorgeous, you’re probably the most well-mannered person on the team, you’re strong—in more ways than one—and you’re selfless to a fault. You know anybody’d be lucky to have you. I’m just glad it wasn’t that slime-licker Sugimura.”

“Slime-licker,” she said, as if in disbelief.

Akira nodded. Just remembering Sugimura’s smug face made him want to punch something, and under his pillow, the crest thrummed with power.

He held back laughter; even the gods agreed.

He said, “Guy looked liked he swallowed a Jelly Blob and enjoyed it. I don’t know about you, but… not my thing.”

“A Jelly—oh!” she said, finally remembering. They’d gone to the Ruins of Memory once, scouring the place for broken glass, and used up their meager supply of elemental gems on the enemies inside before they’d even found a display room. The things absorbed bullets and strikes like they were nothing, and only the torrents of water and blazes of fire had done them in. Smug little bastards, they were.

Akira would have to go back some time, see if the persistent call of the crest actually did anything other than make his skin itch with promise. Haru’s shoulders shook with laughter she stifled under a hand, and Ryuji rolled over in his sleep, muttering something too soft to understand.

Akira and Haru went back to the storm, comfortable in the quiet.

* * *

Akira had to admit one thing: over the months that had gone by, he’d come to expect the hostility the boy liked to greet him with. Being ignored despite his spot in the boy’s mother’s chair was new, and Akira couldn’t decide if he liked it or not.

Not many people outright ignored him. Most at least came over to spit in his face—if they were rival Drifters and Akira’s team had stolen some job from them—or to say hello, which was most everyone else. Akira liked being liked, and he enjoyed getting under the skin of everyone else.

But he held the complaint in check, the crest sitting innocent on the table. The Baskars had looked at him funny all day, until they’d asked him to leave for a while—actually asked him, taken him aside and explained that while they didn’t know what was different, they just knew it was, and the spirits of the land were likely to become restless if he stayed for very long. Queen hadn’t enjoyed being told he’d be gone until he’d told her he’d try the Ruins of Memory again.

She’d appraised him then. “Are you sure?” she’d asked.

“Yeah,” he’d said. “Picked up a… secret weapon. Want to see if it works or not.”

But the truth was that he didn’t want to go on his own. Those damn Blobs might have wiped out his whole team if they weren’t careful. He had no reason to suspect that the crest would help him much, if at all.

The boy muttered to himself as he worked in the kitchen, washing and scrubbing and trimming and generally pretending that Akira wasn’t there and that Morgana wasn’t outside, napping in the shade of the farm house.

This was Akira’s first day visit since the day they’d met. He expected at least a little fanfare, but he sat quiet and waited with a new book in his hands, something a little less presumptuous than the last one. It was just a mystery novel, and Akira curled up and read while the Elw boy worked and ignored him, diving so deep into the story that he didn’t notice time passing until the light streaming in through the window was nearly gone. He blinked and shook himself. It was almost like waking from a long sleep.

There was a plate on the table next to the crest. The Elw boy frowned at it, ears thrown back, posture rigid. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

“From someone who’s met your uncle,” Akira said, guessing. From the boy’s slight twitch, he was right. He dragged his plate over and ate mindlessly, not bothering to wonder what kind of spices had gone into the dish. It definitely wasn’t plain salt.

If he thought hard enough, he’d realize this was the first time the boy had made him food, but Akira couldn’t tell if it was good or not.

Yoriko’s fault, he supposed. That and there wasn’t any butter to be had.

The boy reached across the table and paused before his fingers touched the crest. “May I?” he asked.

“I didn’t leave it there to taunt you.”

The boy grunted, pulling the crest up to eye level. “Schturdark,” he muttered.

“Bless you,” Akira said.

The boy shot him a glare. “If you spent this much time reading up on religion, you’d know who that is,” he spat.

“I do know; it’s just a ridiculous name.” Akira couldn’t even pronounce it. The closest he ever managed to get was Turtle. It had to be close enough.

“It’s the name of one of the last surviving Guardians. You should treat it with more respect.”

Akira shrugged. He could try, sure, but that didn’t mean much if the crest didn’t do anything. Was he supposed to just carry it around in his pocket for the rest of his life? Pray to it on occasion?

The boy went back to appraisal, wine-dark eyes narrowed. “Schturdark. Guardian of water, the tides, and rain. The tales say that whenever he and Fengalon got into an argument, storms would rage across the earth, fierce ones the likes of which have never been seen. And you’re saying someone just… _gave_ him to you.”

“So it really is a god, then.”

“A god given a physical form that we can interact with, yes,” the boy said. He looked to the bookcase and stared for a while and added, “My… uncle… told me they assumed these forms to walk the earth. That living in the divine realms for so long had weakened their connection to the planet. One who possesses a crest can call upon the powers of the Guardian it holds, in moderation.”

“Which means?”

“Why are you asking?” the boy sneered. “Going to go off and test it, are you? The power of a god in your hand, and you’re going to—”

“I’m asking because I don’t know what it does,” Akira interrupted. “I don’t know what it does, or what it’s for. I wouldn’t know how to use it even if I wanted to. It sat on a bookshelf for the past five hundred years. It can’t have seen much use, and aside from the benign blessings it gave Humphrey’s Peak, I’m not sure it even has any.”

The boy’s lips pursed. “You think it useless, then.”

“I think I know nothing about it.” Hadn’t he just said so?

“Then you brought it here because?”

“Because you’ve proven to know more than me on almost everything religious. I thought having an expert take a look couldn’t hurt.”

“An expert, hm,” the boy said, and if Akira wasn’t watching closely he might have missed the slight preen as he said it.

 _That’s my in_ , he thought, while saying, “Yes, exactly. If anyone would know, it would be you or your uncle, who’s proving to be more elusive than an Antioch. I thought I’d take my chances here.”

“Your flattery could use some work,” the boy said, handing the crest over and standing. “But, since it doesn’t seem like you’ll leave until I do, I’ve no choice, do I?”

He walked into the hall, gathered up his desert suit, than retreated to a bedroom hiding in the back of the house. Akira washed his plate and downed a cup of water by the time he came back, demonic in his patchwork suit and spiked helmet. He strapped an old ARM to his belt.

And, just like that, without any prompting or begging on Akira’s part, they headed for the Ruins of Memory. An old museum from the time of prosperity after the planet had settled, it had once been the home of Elw artifacts, remnants of old Earth cultures, and the various wars the settlers had fought in space. Now it was a dusty, ransacked, weather-beaten tomb, home to the bastardous Jelly Blobs and enough shards of broken, tempered glass to make the Ark salivate. They left Morgana by the entrance, his reins tied to his saddlehorn, and headed in.

Ancient torches flared to life in the walls, though their light flickered and dimmed like fire. The statues hovering by the doors were covered in scorch marks and had enough chunks taken out of them for Akira to remember that this was where his team had used the last of their Thunder Gems, sending lightning bouncing across the walls. It hadn’t been a pretty spectacle, and they’d left behind whatever spoils the Blobs had dropped. Someone else must have come in and collected them since, as the only thing littering the floor was chunks of rock ripped out of the ceiling and sand kicked inside by a stray breeze.

“Give me the crest,” the boy ordered, and Akira handed it over. He could see the Blobs already oozing out of the holes in the ceiling, their pink, amorphous brains squeezing through cracks like, well, jelly. One plopped onto a statue’s upraised hand. Another fell to a shoulder and slipped off to hit the floor with a splat.

Akira’s hands were already at his belt. Even useless, his weapons could buy them enough time to run back out the door if they had to.

“Now, in order to use what powers the Guardian living in the crest possesses, you must first synchronize with it,” the boy was saying. The air around them thickened with pressure; Akira’s suit flashed a warning about the humidity, of all things, right before a sphere of water took form around the Blob creeping its way to them from the floor. Its stubby leg-things waggled in fright as the sphere tightened and shrank until the brain inside was squeezed into pulp by the pressure.

Something bright and shining fell to the floor in its place.

“Imagine what your enemy would look like squeezed to death by water pressure,” the boy went on, “or frozen into ice and shattered. Schturdark’s crest will do the rest, but just like an ARM, you mustn’t let your concentration slip. The spell won’t be nearly as effective then, and the enemy might slip free and attack while your guard is down.”

The Blob on the hand froze while he talked, one wriggling leg-thing at a time. The harder it fought, the faster it broke into pieces, until all that was left of it, too, was chunks of ice quickly melting in the heat and something shining falling to the floor. Akira picked both of those things up: gems, one a bright ice-blue and the other as deep and dark as the ancient Filgaian sea.

The boy nodded as he turned. “You can build up a decent stockpile like this, or sell them for profit. Plenty of monsters these days are growing immune to bullets. Drifters will pay a hefty price for them.”

“I didn’t realize this was how they were made,” Akira said.

The boy shrugged. He handed over the crest. “You haven’t realized plenty of things. Now, I expect you to be taking out these nuisances without a second’s thought before we leave for the day. Understand?”

Akira began to nod but hesitated. “What if one gets past me? ARMs don’t do anything to them. I’d hate to see you hurt.”

“Do you think I’m a pushover?” the boy hissed, right in his face. Their masks were so close they almost smacked into each other, the dark tinted glass covering the boy’s eyes nearly obscuring them, so different from the team’s clear ones. “I can take a few hits from these pests with no trouble. You don’t need to be worrying over me, understand?”

Akira was sorely tempted to argue. If anything happened to them in the ruins, it would be Akira’s fault for asking to learn how to use the crest, and then the boy’s garden would lie untended until the Ark eventually found it, as they found all things. Shido had held a party the year before after proclaiming they had finally found the last dragon’s nest, long abandoned by its inhabitant, in some distant mountain. Nothing was safe from the Ark’s greedy hands.

But the boy had lived this long without suffering some debilitating injury. Akira could trust him to hold his own. “Alright,” he said, gripping the crest harder until its edges dug into his fingers.

“Good,” said the boy, with a glint in one darkened eye, “and if I do manage to get hurt—I’ll show you the other properties of the crest, understand?”

Akira nodded, hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

* * *

Morgana snorted with irritation, flicking his tail against an itch on his rump. Akira scratched it, knowing it was futile without a good curry brush—with his gloves and Morgana’s thick fur, nothing seemed to penetrate it. “Don’t be like that,” Akira told him anyway. “I’m worn out, too, you know.”

And he was: he and the boy had stayed out at the Ruins of Memory for a good three days, only leaving to wander over to Jolly Roger for the night. Lala would never talk, Max was as silent as ever, Chihaya busked her fortunes on the street—and Ohya, luckily, was out chasing down some lead on a story three stops down the railway. Akira couldn’t remember which town it was, or if it even had a name anymore.

So, naturally, at the end of it Akira was tired of the stink of Jolly Roger’s smokestacks and sandport, of the oil and vomit and booze permeating its back alleys, and even of the persistent whine and rumble as sandships braving the inner sandsea came in to deliver goods and refuel and perform maintenance. All the noise grated on his nerves. He couldn’t imagine what the boy and Morgana were going through, with their sensitive animal hearing.

(Did that make Akira a bigot? He couldn’t be sure. The boy had animal ears; he had to have animal hearing. Right?)

And he’d been sure that Chihaya sensed something odd about him, glaring at him whenever they passed each other by as if he were a puzzle she was stuck on. But she never said a word, just pursed her lips and ducked her head, her eyes glued to his pocket where the crest lay hidden.

If even Akira could feel it at times, it had to be downright palpable for her. It was no wonder the Baskars told him to stay away, if this was how one sensitive person reacted. A whole village of them, now, there was the scary thought.

Akira shuddered. The boy, returning from his garden with the promised box of cast-offs and trimmings, thunked the box down. “What?” he said, as sharp as ever. His voice could almost be a deadly weapon. “Don’t tell me all that training wore you out, Drifter boy.”

“I have a name, you know,” Akira said, accepting the glass of water as Morgana crunched his way through the box.

“Do you? I find I don’t care, considering how often I’ve tried to get you to leave and never return.”

The water was heavenly. It was miles better than anything his suit filtered, though it wasn’t as pure as the water from the crest. Akira drank it down greedily, until he was sucking on the dregs at the bottom. “That’s because you haven’t been trying very hard.”

The boy humphed, heading inside the farmhouse. Akira followed after making sure Morgana was situated in his favorite spot in the shade, and with enough water in the makeshift trough to leave him satisfied. He thought he’d seen some grooming tools in the shed behind the house, but if the boy knew for sure, it would save him some time.

It was the least he could do, after all the horse had done for him.

“See, like now,” Akira said, stripping his mask off in the cool of the house. “Here I am again, and you’ve fed and watered both me and my borrowed horse like you’re obligated to, which you aren’t. I’d know.”

The amount of times he and his parents had been denied well access for the sheer audacity of being Drifters couldn’t be counted. Maybe that was why they’d left him at the Ark, where the water didn’t quite flow so much as seep, but there was enough of it.

“Maybe I think you’re useful to me,” said the boy from somewhere down the hall. Akira froze, unsure of whether he was allowed to follow or not, but this was the Elw boy he’d slept beside in Lala’s cramped inn. Surely he wouldn’t balk now.

Akira swallowed, throat as dry as the desert outside. He dared a step and the wood creaked beneath him. “Because I can hold a ladder for you?”

The boy changed tactics: “Maybe my mother likes you. She likes everyone. She’s always been foolish like that, letting whomever dropped by into her home and her heart and her—”

He stopped suddenly. “Her what?” Akira asked, softly, thinking he knew. When the soul was hungry for companionship it took whatever it could get, whenever it could get. Akira still felt that gnawing desire, too deep for any amount of food or drink to fill.

What was worse: his acknowledgment of it, or his team’s acknowledgment of it?

The answer was a shaky breath as Akira eased down the hallway. One bedroom door was closed—the mother’s—but the other was open. Sunlight spilled in through a grimy window; filmy, dust-clogged curtains did their best to filter it out and failed. There was a desk in one corner and a bed in the other and bookshelves on the wall, filled to the brim with old books: moldering leather tomes, scrolls of maps, academic journals, paperbacks with the spines so worn and cracked that the pages were held together with string.

Akira ignored the crest on the desk of a tiger mid-jump, its fangs prepared to rip and maim, and focused on the boy instead. He’d stripped off his suit and left it in a puddle on the floor, the helmet already hanging on a bedpost.

“Would you like to know something?” the boy asked, as Akira edged inside. His arms were corded with muscle, and his back was a rippling tide, and the soft honey tone of his skin almost sang in the gloom.

“Sure,” Akira croaked out.

“Among the list of atrocities the Elw committed that led to their eventual genocide, is it ever mentioned that they dared to marry their colonizers?”

Akira thought back to the pages of the book and the mocking sketch inside. Marriage with an Elw? They were supposed to be proud and stubborn, weren’t they? “No.”

“Of course not,” the boy said, not seeming to care that he was in nothing but a threadbare pair of drawers. The swell of his ass stretched the fabric to its limits; Akira turned to face a bookshelf, wondering when his life had gotten so strange. “Attempted murder and assassination; theft; destruction of property… the list enjoys going on and on, but it never mentions that the colonizers entered agreements with the Elw first. It never mentions the Treatise of Reservation, for example, or the Aggalapach Agreement. The Elw didn’t want their planet trampled upon; they wanted their gods, the planet’s gods, to be worshiped; they wanted peace as they’d always known it. They allowed a few towns centered around a few spaceships, taught humankind how to grow the food they were accustomed to, and all they asked was for the men to stay in their towns and for Elw priests to preach to the people. It was a simple arrangement.”

Akira stayed silent. Mankind, confined to a few towns and the surrounding farmland? _Agreeing_ to it? Never.

“And at first it worked. The Elw priests preached to whomever cared to listen, and men feared to step foot outside of their little towns, ravaged as the outside world was with monsters. But they saw the Elw come and go and soon grew angry: why should they abide by some flimsy treaty and unfair rules when it was obvious the Elw were keeping them trapped? Why should they live in fear when it was obvious the Elw controlled the monsters?”

“Did they? Control the monsters?” Akira asked, focusing on a still-legible title: _A History of Terra, Vol. 15_.

“Of course not,” the boy snapped. “The Elw had the protection of their gods to keep them safe, and knew how to fight when they needed to. They sent their best warriors and their most respected clergymen to the towns mankind had built, and knew that if one didn’t return they had gone willingly. That happened in many a town: fierce warriors waylaid by monsters and healed by mankind. Devout priests draining themselves of their inner strength and resting at the hearth of a Terran nun. What do you _think_ happened?”

“‘And they came from the dark places: the shadows beneath the floorboards, the ashes in the hearth, the cold damp of the cellar. So many were the Elw that infiltrated the town of man, their fingers sharp as knives, their fangs as deadly as a snake’s, that mankind had no choice but to drive them off,’” Akira quoted. He’d always wondered how it was that an infestation of that magnitude had been overlooked for so long. Now he had an answer. “Interbreeding, in short.”

“Exactly,” the boy said, with a shuffle of fabric that signaled him pulling a shirt on. Or some pants. Akira was too spent to even consider the implications—that maybe the boy wanted an excuse to hurt him, or that maybe he’d been silently asking for a quick lay—but they flitted through his mind anyway. They always did: you were used or you used first, and that was the law of the wasteland.

But he wasn’t about to take without asking, without knowing, without confirming.

“And the Elw live long lives,” Akira went on as the boy continued to get dressed. “It would stand to reason that it would seem as if they were popping up out of nowhere when really they’d just been disregarded or overlooked. And if even one or two or their children were Elw, too—”

“Not just one or two,” the boy interrupted. “All of them. Every child born to a human and an Elw was an Elw. Their parents learned to hide their ears and pass as human. They did so for generations; that mingling of bloodlines is the reason we don’t worship Terran gods. But it all ended. You know why.”

Hatred and fear and prejudice and anger. Mankind refusing to be locked in a cage any longer, and the only ones insisting they keep their end of the bargain were the Elw. It would have been easy if the masses had been incited enough. It would have been a slaughter with their space-age weapons and the Elw insistence on peace.

The boy let out a sharp noise; he crossed over to the window and fussed with the curtains. “Sometimes I wonder if I have family out there, on the wasteland,” he said. “Brothers and sisters. Mother would have loved them too much to make them hate her by keeping them here; she would have let them go on their own way to become their own people in their own time. Then I remind myself that even Drifters like you think of us as no better than monsters, and I wonder if their bones feed the sand. Most of the time I think I’m alone and always will be.”

“Forever?” Akira asked, spying another legible title in a Terran language that had been lost to time.

“Naturally,” the boy said, and Akira turned and saw him shrug helplessly. “As you said, the Elw live long lives. Our women had long pregnancies. My father is long dead by now, and even if I knew his name, his family wouldn’t want me as one of their own. So I stay here and care for Mother, wondering if I’ll outlive the human race, and if green will creep back onto the surface by the time I die. Filgaia will become a world of monsters, then. The gods won’t live long without us.”

“And your uncle?” Akira asked, without meaning to. “What will he do, once everyone is gone?”

The boy turned. One hand went to the tiger crest on the desk while the other dangled by his side. Shadows obscured his face. Akira could only guess that he was irritated. “I don’t know. He’ll die, eventually. Everything and everyone does. Or perhaps he’ll become the villainous god of the Gob’s religion, swooping in to cut them down whenever it suits his fancy. He’s flighty, as all Drifters are.”

Because they have to be, Akira wanted to argue. Towns that can barely feed themselves kick out their young and those young either turn to Drifting or they die, plain and simple.

The boy said, “You’ll die, too. That horse out there, so will he. And then I’ll be alone again. I don’t want to watch you age, Drifter. I don’t want to grow any closer than I already have. When you leave, don’t come back.”

“And if I don’t leave?” Akira asked, and dared a step closing the distance between them. The boy’s ears flicked toward the groan of floorboards.

“Drifters never stay. They’re flighty,” the boy repeated, sounding as if he wanted to be firm but couldn’t manage it. “And I could very easily be your demise, you know.”

“Doubt it.” There were rag dolls along the shelf above the desk, floppy little things that were worn down with love. The boy’s hand was mere inches away from the tiger crest, and Akira let one gloved hand hover over it. Whatever emotions flitted through the boy’s face were lost to shadow, but Akira could hear anticipation in the harshness of his breath.

“If you wanted to kill me, you would have done it by now,” Akira said. “Instead you acted like a child who didn’t know what he wanted—you were prickly, sure, but you never kicked me out. It would have been your right to chase me off your property. Nobody would have batted an eye at that.”

“You’re reading too much into it,” the boy protested.

“You could push me away, right now,” Akira told him, and waited a heartbeat, then two. “But you don’t. You look young, but how long has it been since you’ve had anyone to talk to, aside from this flighty uncle? Years? Decades?”

The boy couldn’t look at him anymore. Akira took his sudden interest in the bookshelf as a yes and plowed on: “Y’see, I see lonely people like you and I can’t leave them alone. Maybe I like thinking I’m making their day whenever I talk to them. Maybe I like thinking I’m the only one on their mind. Maybe I’m just searching for other people like me so we can all be a little less lonely together. If I meet my end too soon, my team and my friends in the towns will have each other’s backs. But you? Who’s going to be there for you?”

“I’ve managed just fine on my own,” the boy protested again, this time in a harsh whisper. Maybe he would have shouted if not for the hush of the house and the quiet settling around them like dust.

Akira took his hand back, stripped off his glove, and then let it rest on top of the boy’s. Akira’s hands were calloused from too many years of sample taking and monster fighting, and so were the boy’s from too many years wrangling a garden all on his lonesome.

The boy jerked his gaze to their hands. Words caught in his throat though his mouth worked, until finally he asked, “What do you really want from me?”

Akira considered firing the question back at him—but like Yuuki, there was no way for him to know the truth. He’d been left alone with his thoughts too many times, and once doubt crept in, it was hard to shake. Akira thought of that look in Yusuke’s eyes and holding Ann’s hand and sitting quietly with the other girls on the team, with nothing between them except the words Akira couldn’t say. He thought of the way Futaba had cried and Makoto had scolded and Haru had turned her gaze out the window to watch the ghost rain fall, and realized that maybe they weren’t sure of what they wanted, either.

Wanting to stay. Wanting to go. Wanting to keep precious ones close and wanting to watch them be happy off on their own.

Wanting. He was always wanting.

But he was always waiting, too.

“I don’t know,” Akira said. He had reached out and touched Yusuke and Ann, and they had met him where he was for the briefest of moments. Then they had left.

Everyone left. Even Akira would leave, someday.

The boy swiped a tear off Akira’s cheek. “Well,” he said, then paused just long enough that Akira knew he wasn’t letting himself think too much. “Well. I’d—I’d be a terrible host if I let you wander off into the wilderness at such a late hour”—and indeed, the sun was streaking bright gold and orange behind him; it caught in the loose fibers of his shirt, and Akira thought he looked as divine as those ancient Terran angels—“and—and there is another room. For you to use. If you wish to.”

“Is that how you ask someone to stay?”

“Don’t be absurd,” the boy said, tugging his hand back. “It’s how I say, ‘Don’t go out there and get yourself killed when you’re still weary from our crest practice.’ If you died before you reached your team I’d have only myself to blame. And perhaps that beast of a horse as well.”

He brushed past Akira, leaving the golden glow of the setting sun.

“That’s not very fair. Morgana’s a good horse,” Akira said, as the boy left the room entirely and creaked his way down the hall.

Akira stood there for a while, soaking in the last of the sun, until the burn of tears faded.

 _Am I really so transparent?_ Yusuke had asked him once, months and months ago. But maybe that was true for everyone. Maybe that was true for Akira, too.

He fled the room. There was safety in the sitting room with its bookcases and in the kitchen with its counters full of food. Out there, he could be himself again.

If only he could be sure what that self was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is all just proof that I shouldn't write when I'm exhausted, isn't it.


	6. The Chariot

Skull yawned. His jaw opened so wide his mask flexed underneath, and the ARM in his hands shuddered through its syncing process; Akira’s was ready and waiting, nearly vibrating with anticipation.

 _I know_ , he wanted to tell it.

“How can you be yawning at a time like this?” Panther asked over the comms, waiting in the rear of the camp with Queen. Her and Skull’s spray-and-pray ARMs weren’t meant for precision work; no one wanted to hit one of the hostages on accident. Her voice shook.

She’d never get used to this. Akira figured that was a good thing.

“C’mon, man,” Skull whined, “it’s dark, we’re all usually”—another yawn—“asleep by now. Gimme a break, here.”

“We can rest once the hostages have been retrieved,” Queen reminded him, and he grunted in annoyance. Akira watched the bandits—a pair of Drifters, grimy with dust and sand, their old-model masks cracking where the straps stretched over the back of their heads—but damn, those two were smart. Whenever one faced one way, the other would watch his back, and they circled the hostages like monsters circled prey.

Akira held up a hand, signaling to Fox waiting in the rearguard with Oracle and Noir. The puff of breath he received over the comms was all the response he received before the bandit facing Queen’s position was nothing more than a smear of blood and brains on the rocks. His partner whirled; Queen’s ARM unloaded into his chest as she ducked out of cover, firing with eerie precision.

Akira ran in and caught him before he had the chance to crush the hostages; Skull and Panther began to circle the perimeter, the scuff of their boots over hard-packed dirt loud in the sudden silence.

Oracle matched names and faces to the hostages as Queen untied them. All young, not a one over ten; a few of them began to cry, startled by the noise or the flash of bullets or even the sight of their first kill. Blood dripped down one of their faces; Queen mopped it up with a handkerchief she’d tied around an arm.

“One of them’s missing,” Oracle informed. “Fourteen-year-old girl. Sandy-brown hair, a port wine stain on her cheek.”

Panther’s fury was audible as Akira took the time to make sure the remaining bandit was dead, then turned him on his back. In the dark, the pool of blood would seem like shadow. The kids didn’t need to be traumatized any more than they already were.

“Hey, shh,” Queen was telling them. “Your parents sent us to help you. We’ll make sure you all get home safe, okay?”

“You can’t,” Fox was saying at the same time. “If the girl is there, too—”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t scare them a little, does it?” Noir asked, genteel and unassuming. Akira shivered at the bloodlust inherent even over the comms. “There were supposed to be four bandits, yet we’ve killed only two.”

“Bastards,” Panther spat.

Skull snorted. “Quit acting like you’re the only one that wants a piece of ‘em.”

“—took ‘er, they took ‘er,” one of the kids was saying, his whispering harsh in the night. “They took Louise, they took my sister away. You gonna save her, too?”

Their eyes were wide with fear, but the boy clung to Queen’s suit, and the rest followed. Louise was brave, they said. Louise went off ‘cause the grown-ups said they’d hurt the kids if she didn’t, they said. Louise didn’t want to go, but she did, they cried.

“Oracle,” Akira muttered.

“I’m on it, geez,” she said, harried. “We haven’t mapped this place out in forever. I’m setting a note to do that soon.”

“Set the damn note later and find someplace they’d crawl into now, maybe,” Skull growled.

“Which way did they go?” Queen asked, knowing it was futile. Between the hours that had gone by and the circling of Akira’s team, any footprints would have been erased by the desert winds.

Akira stifled a noise of irritation as every kid pointed in a different direction. Louise’s brother said, “’Tween the big rocks. The ones that look like claws comin’ outta the ground. I watched ‘em go, and the sun was touchin’ the tip o’ one, they went right ‘tween ‘em. Then I couldn’t see no more.”

Skull gave a brief acknowledgment as Akira passed the info along.

And some of the kids nodded along, and some of them shook their heads and started saying something different entirely, until the whole group was a mess of bickering opinions and crying. An eight-year-old was rocking a four-year-old with a steely, determined expression on his face.

“Quiet,” Queen hissed, and the noise ceased. The rearguard stepped into the camp, and the kids sat hushed and quiet as they planned.

Ten minutes went by. Queen and Akira circled the perimeter in place of Panther and Skull; Noir and Fox kept the kids quiet with stories told low in the faint starlight. None of them seemed to want to go back to sleep, save for the youngest.

Twenty minutes went by. More of the kids were sleeping now, and Akira’s eyes strained for movement through his mask’s visor; Panther trotted back into view, shaking her head at his unasked question but too wound up to sit still. Akira left her to his perimeter search and took off after Skull, pinging his team every few minutes.

“Would they really have gone so far?” Queen questioned.

“Indeed, it’s unwise,” Fox agreed.

The rest was lost as he moved out of comms range, passing the claw-shaped rocks, mask picking out Skull’s footprints. Akira followed blindly, ARM at the ready, his mask picking up the noise of night-roaming monsters and the screech of a Pordarge flock some distance away. Akira wasn’t sure how long he ran, just that he did. They were miles out of the camp before his mask picked up the static of Skull’s comms ping, the curses moving as swift as the sandsea underneath.

Akira shut them off with, “I’m here.”

“Gods!” Skull shouted. “Shit! Damn, that—that effin’ terrified me, man. Don’t do that. I’m over here, by the—the hanging rock.”

It was just a large rock, tilted to one side and propped on a set of smaller ones to form a kind of cave, but in the day it would provide cool shade and shelter from prying eyes. Skull paced in front of the entrance, ARM gripped so tightly it was a wonder it didn’t fall apart. The things could be surprisingly fragile.

Skull motioned to the inside of the cave with his head, scanning the horizon for that flock of Pordarge, and Akira ducked in.

In his head, he’d known what he’d find. That didn’t make it any easier.

The last two Drifters and Louise rested inside. One of the Drifters—a man with a thick beard that impeded proper mask placement—was slumped over against a wall, his shirt crusted over with blood and pocked with bullet holes. The other—another man, his graying hair once slicked back from his forehead now in tangles around his face—was on his back, spread-eagled, his ARM mere inches from his hand. He stared blankly at his partner, and blood had trickled out of his mouth and dried.

And Louise—

Akira tried not to gasp. This was another law of the wasteland: everything came to an end. Even Drifters, even monsters, even fourteen-year-old girls with little brothers to protect.

“Skull,” he said instead, “go back to the camp. They need to know we’ve found Louise and the other bandits.” He hesitated for a moment. Leaving the girl here was out of the question, but he and Skull alone wouldn’t be able to handle it. They’d need one more. Fox—no, not Fox. He’d do it, but Akira wanted one of the girls to instead. He couldn’t protect them anymore.

Then, who? Not Panther; she’d fly into a rage at the sight and empty her clip into the dead, blind to the waste. Not Queen; she’d need to stay behind and corral the kids. They were safe with her around, and Fox could pick off any monster in a hundred-yard radius of the camp with ease. Definitely not Oracle.

“Come back here and bring Noir,” he decided. Noir was strong enough to carry the girl, and she wouldn’t complain, either. “We’ll take Louise back with us then.”

“What should I tell the kids, then?”

“I think they know.”

Her brother hadn’t mentioned bringing her back alive, after all, and it was likely none of them thought they’d be rescued. They’d resigned themselves to their fate in ways that kids shouldn’t have to.

Akira grit his teeth.

Skull’s boots pounded their way inside the cave. His comm link shut off, and he said, “Why’s this hafta happen, man? She’s—she’s fourteen. There’s girls at Jolly Roger, ain’t there?”

“You can’t buy girls without coin,” Akira said. The bandit he’d done in at the camp had a nearly empty purse—barely enough for a night at Lala’s, and Lala’s was the cheapest damn inn on the planet. “My guess is they only had enough between them for an inn or a girl, and the girls don’t let you stay once it’s over. They’d’ve been sleeping on the streets.”

He thought of the stinking alley he’d taken to see Chihaya last time. A team of Drifters like this would be lucky to find enough dry space for one of them, much less four.

“Besides, some of the girls at Jolly Roger are fourteen, too,” he added, and Skull made a noise of disgust. He pounded back out of the cave without another word.

Akira rocked back on his heels, shut his eyes, and wished he could cry for this girl. He couldn’t.

So he shook his head and went to work.

Sewing up the ripped seams in her shirt and the long gash in her skirt came first, he decided, and did just that, with big, sloppy strokes of the needle and thread from his belt. It didn’t have to look good. She’d have better clothes for burial in town, and Akira didn’t want the kids—or the girls—to see her like that, messy and so obviously debauched. There was a bruise on her left breast, and another on her belly, and he covered them up.

Simple. Straightforward. No one needed to know about the mess he wiped off her thighs; no one needed to know about the loose tooth nearly knocked clean out her mouth. The port wine stain was black with another bruise, and blood had dripped a trail down her back from a messy head wound.

He sewed that up, too, and found himself talking.

“Brave girl,” he said, tugging out a rag and wetting it with barely a thought. He wiped up the grime from her face, scrubbed the more insistent stains, cleaned the dirt from her hands. The stolen ARM fell from her grip to clatter on the floor.

“Did you think of this all by yourself, Louise? I’m impressed, and it’s hard to impress me. You’ve got a spine of steel, don’t you? I’ll make sure your family’s proud of what you did here. They don’t have to know the worst of it, do they?”

Though they’d guess, the way all parents did. They’d dress her for burial and learn the truth.

That, somehow, was harder to deal with. They’d set out to save the hostages, and yet they’d failed before they even began. Akira and his team couldn’t be everywhere at once; they couldn’t save everyone. They were a last resort if they didn’t stumble onto the problem.

Akira pushed aside spent bullet casings. They rattled across the floor with a clear, ringing sound—that, at least, was the one pure thing in the world.

He sighed. He’d failed one girl and now he was spiraling. Perfect.

“Brave girl,” he repeated, voice a little harsher, a little softer. He shut her eyes, closed her mouth. “They’ll miss you, you know. Every day of their damn lives, they’ll miss you. But at least you’ll have gone home to them. At least your sweetheart can mourn you properly.”

The boy had practically begged them to bring the kids home, despite his dislocated jaw. He’d shoved his savings—a half-full money purse jingling with gella—under their faces. Pleaded with them to do something, anything.

At least Akira knew why, now. He fiddled with Louise’s collar, trying to tug it over the bruises on her neck, but it was too short and kept falling.

He forced himself to turn from her, searching the other bandits’ pockets. No receipts or contracts, only a handful of gella each and a dried Heal Berry or two tucked away. On their last legs, then, like he’d told Skull, and some of the less scrupulous towns were always looking for cheap or free labor. Kids wouldn’t put up much of a fight, even if they were a pain to transport.

Akira doubted whether the bandits cared if some of them died on the way or not. They’d rounded up nearly all the kids in town. They couldn’t have.

Boots sounded at the entrance: Skull and Noir, her ARM slung over her back. She surveyed the cave, the dead bandits, the dead girl, Akira.

He stepped aside, letting her through. She scooped up Louise and they set off back to the camp, where Louise’s little brother stifled his tears down. He refused to leave her side as they rested, and when they broke camp at first light and headed back to town, he kept a hand on her boot, on the edge of her skirt, on her hand dangling limp from Noir’s, then Fox’s, then Queen’s arms. He was the one who made sure the rest of the kids were down before he ducked out of sight of roving monsters, and he was the one who watched carefully as the rest of them ate the team’s meager rations.

Akira took him aside as the town’s fence came into view. A bell clanged out a welcome; a crowd formed before very long at the gate. The kids went running into their parent’s or sibling’s arms, and even from a distance Akira could hear the wails.

“Listen,” Akira said, kneeling in the dirt to look the boy in the eye. “Your sister did what she had to to keep you all safe. She would have wanted to keep living, but she didn’t, and I know she wouldn’t want you to throw your life away just because you think she did.”

The boy nodded. Good, Akira thought. So he wasn’t entirely stupid.

“Protecting what and who’s important to you is good,” Akira told him, “but it doesn’t feel very good for who’s left behind, does it?”

“No,” the boy said.

Akira nodded. No, not stupid at all. “You have to be smart to stay alive. That’s how it is. You also have to be smart to outwit those who are bigger and stronger than you. That’s also how it is. Did Louise ever shoot an ARM before?”

The boy looked at him, eyes going wide as he shook his head. “She shot ‘em?”

Akira nodded.

“My sister did?” the boy asked, to be sure. “Louise did?”

“That’s what killed her,” he told the boy, and watched admiration morph into terror. “A big revolver-type like the one she stole has recoil. It packs a lot of punch into it. You don’t notice it when the wielder shoots, because they’re used to it. They know how to take it. But a little girl like your sister, with that ARM?”

He hesitated on his next words. It would be the equivalent of being shot herself. She’d gotten lucky with any hit at all; recoil turned aiming into a fine art.

“Saw a traderman’s horse kick ‘im once,” the boy offered. “’E went— _splat_!—right int’a wall. We all thought’e died, ‘e bled so much. Like that?”

“Yeah,” Akira said. “Like that.”

Head wounds were nasty. Some bled a man out; others clogged up and stopped within hours. Louise hadn’t been lucky, with all that rock around.

Brave girl. Stupid girl.

The boy nodded, far too solemn for seven years. “But ya brought ‘er back,” he said, and threw his arms around Akira’s neck. “Ya brought ‘er back. S’all I wanted. I didn’—didn’ want the monsters to get ‘er, ‘n now they won’. She’ll sleep with the wheat. I’ll make ‘em put ‘er there.”

“Good,” Akira said, picking the boy up and standing in one motion. The boy cried into his suit, and the suit sucked up the water with all the grace of a drunk Rat Monkey, and the boy didn’t want to let go even when his parents came to grab him with the blank looks of new grief. Akira was forced to pry him off, and he stood there, wondering at the crying faces, at the thunderous looks, at Louise’s sweetheart’s wails as he knelt over her body. Someone came forward and tried to press gella into his hands, and Akira pushed them away.

They might have needed the money eventually, but… not like this. Not when it left a sour taste in his mouth, not when it was more likely than not to be every gella the little town had. They would need it to survive, and Akira and his team didn’t.

Not with the Ark on their side.

* * *

The boy said nothing when Akira appeared at his door.

That was the way he liked it.

* * *

Ryuji finished up his run on the treadmill, frowning and glaring at the machine as its rollers clacked back into place. The thing was old, older than half the technology in the Ark, and it showed in the uneven lay of the tread, the cracked and splintered plastic rollers, the handles that had long since fallen off. It was a death trap just waiting for a victim, and Ryuji was the only one stupid enough to keep using it.

But when he wanted a run, it was the only way to get one without risking crashing into someone in the halls. Akira always trained with him when the itch got too bad, because if Ryuji impaled himself on one of the handles, Akira wanted to be there.

He’d laugh, but he’d help.

Ryuji sat on the bench beside him, snatching up his water bottle and taking a long swig. Akira stared at the equipment, and the mats laid out on the floor, and the years and years of wear and tear, the dehumidifiers working in the corners. Eventually the gym room would be emptied out, but for now, Akira enjoyed it.

They sat in silence for a while. Then Ryuji said, “Ain’t this the part where you tell me if I fall on that thing and die, you’ll laugh your ass off?”

“Suppose so,” Akira said. His arms still stung from his own workout with the training dummy in the corner. He’d have bruises in the morning.

“You can’t get over it, either, huh?”

“No,” Akira said. He’d helped shovel the dirt for Louise’s grave. He and his team had stood back and watched as the rest of the town cried and cried, but only Akira was aware of the faint surge of power from the crest in his pocket. The wheat would be good and plentiful this year.

“Fourteen,” Ryuji said, and shook his head. “What were we doing at fourteen?”

“I was busy having the old survey team haul me around to every gods-forsaken corner of the planet,” Akira said, “and when I wasn’t doing that, I was hanging out with Yuuki.”

Because Makoto had gotten pissed at him for more than one thing that year, like breaking his leg in the middle of a mission or dragging Yusuke back to the Ark with him, and a pissed Makoto was not fun to be around.

Ryuji let out a slow breath.

Akira let him take his time.

“Fourteen,” he said again, like he was having trouble remembering. “That was—I was fifteen when I made you take me with you. Me and Ma both. Remember?”

“Yeah.” And it wasn’t like Makoto let him forget that, either. Ryuji’s mother had managed to get a job in the laundry, and she took to the steam presses like a bird to the sky. Ryuji himself had been put through the most intensive training Akira had ever seen to be worthy of joining Akira’s team.

“Fourteen,” Ryuji said again. “Oh, no, now I remember—I beat the shit outta my dad.” He grinned. “Found him passed out drunk in some alley when he didn’t come home one night. Ma’d just told me she’d have to find more work ‘cause the bastard drank down all her earnings. I was squirreling away some gella for—for something. Can’t remember what. But I gave her every last cent I had and then I went for a walk, and I found him, just lying there snoring away like he didn’t have a care in the world. He had a bottle in one hand. So I took it from him and I beat him with it.”

“Shit,” Akira said, and took another swig from his bottle. Then he stared at it: space-age plastic, with a special filter on the top that no one seemed to know how to get rid of.

“Big ol’ glass bottle,” Ryuji went on, getting progressively more excited. “Man, you shoulda heard the way he screamed when that thing hit him. Didn’t even know it was me, either, he was so plastered. And—and whenever he did it again, spent all our coin and got so drunk he couldn’t come home, I did it again. Over and over. I made his life an effin’ hell ‘til he left, the bastard.”

“He just… left?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ryuji said, with a vigorous nod. “Said demons were attacking him in his sleep. It was bullshit, ‘cause it was me. But he was gone anyway, and _then_ everybody remembered seein’ me around whenever he got hurt too bad. They tried to tell me everybody got drunk once in a while, what did I hafta go and do that for, blah, blah, blah. ‘Cept it wasn’t once in a while with him. It was three or four times a week, and he spent everything we had. All of it. He made a tab and put our house up for grabs so he could _drink_.”

He spat the word and went silent for a while, stewing.

Akira wondered what that was like. Knowing you were supposed to be safe and learning you weren’t—that everything you had could be taken or given away at a whim. No wonder Ryuji and his mother had left. When the debt collectors came out of the woodwork, there would have been no place for them to go.

“Still, though,” Ryuji said, once he’d calmed down. “Fourteen—gods. Dead at gods-damned fourteen. What’d she do to deserve that? Huh?”

She shot an ARM with no training or experience, Akira wanted to say, but bit his tongue. Ryuji, at fourteen, had had no training or experience. He’d waited until his opponent was weak and helpless and then bludgeoned him into hysteria. Louise hadn’t had a choice.

“Nothing,” he settled on, and Ryuji growled. “That’s just the way it is. It happens to everybody.”

“Dying, or dying at fourteen?”

“Dying,” Akira said. He took another sip. “You think your dad’s dead?”

“He’d better be,” Ryuji snarled, leg starting to jostle. He stopped it with his hands and started to knead it, pressing in hard with his knuckles. The scar tissue around his knee where Kamoshida had taken an iron pipe—Ryuji’s own iron pipe—and broken his leg bunched up. Around the pale skin it didn’t look like much, but Ryuji grit his teeth as he worked through it.

“He’d _better_ be,” Ryuji repeated. “He’d better be, ‘cause I dunno what I’ll do if I find him. Beat the shit outta him again, I guess. You guys would have my back, right?”

“No,” Akira said. Ryuji stilled beside him. The water bottle was plunked down in between them, like a barrier. As if it would do much good. “No, we wouldn’t. Vengeance for vengeance’s sake? Do you really think I’d let you risk the rest of the team for some stupid, shitty idea like that? Do you know what it would look like if a bunch of Ark workers were spotted beating some nameless man half to death? Sae would have our heads faster than Shido could order it. No.”

Ryuji turned, some argument on his lips, but stopped short at the glare Akira leveled at him. He shut his mouth and turned back to his leg. “I’d have your back, y’know.”

“I don’t want my parents dead, Ryuji,” Akira said.

“They left you.”

“They did,” Akira agreed, and looked back to the treadmill and the ancient weight machine no one had the confidence to try and the training dummy on its smooth-slick mats in the corner. “But I got to meet all of you, and I got to make friends out in the wasteland. I’m somebody because they left me. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, but it’s the truth. If your father didn’t drink until he was pissing blood, do you think you’d be here?”

Ryuji was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “I hate it when you make sense.”

“You hate it when I don’t give your anger an outlet,” Akira corrected. _He misses his bro time_ , Ann had said, but what he really missed was this sharing of their mutual pain. Ryuji wanted someone to be as angry with the world as he was. He wanted them to be angry together.

Akira had long since moved past anger. What he had now was a cool fury, honed to an excessive desire for freedom, and he knew for sure that even if his parents had dumped him in Humphrey’s Peak, he would still chafe in the same ways. Maybe he would have left sooner. Humphrey’s Peak, despite the security, was easy to escape.

Ryuji snorted. “Yeah, that too.” He took a swipe at his nose, then started on his calves. “How do you do it, man?” he asked at length. “How do you, you know, keep from exploding? I saw that damn cave and I started screaming. Woulda unloaded in the bastards ‘til I thought’a what Makoto might do to me if I did.”

Akira hummed, thinking. Whenever he’d whined to his parents about wanting to go on a mission, all he’d gotten for his trouble was a slap. By the time he’d learned to be patient and earn some money while they were gone, it was too late: they’d been talking about the Ark then, asking around towns about it and how to get there. He could still remember the disappointment on their faces whenever he acted out, could still remember daring them to call him useless as he handed over a tiny fistful of gella. Akira could be useful. He wanted to be useful.

He didn’t want them to leave him behind.

“Same thing,” he decided on, and took Ryuji’s slap at his arm full-force.

* * *

“Yes, just like that,” the boy said. Akira carefully poked around at the carrot’s top, looking for signs of rot or mold, and found none. They covered it back up. There was dirt encrusted around his nails that he was sure would never scrub off, and there was moisture in every breath he took.

And if occasionally as they were checking on the ground tubers, their hands brushed, Akira didn’t mind one bit. They had an easy rhythm going by now, and Akira’s legs were covered in dirt as they knelt by one plant then the next. He marveled at them when they were done—and his dirt covered arms, and the dirt in his hair from when he’d brush it back, and the dirt on his face when he scratched an itch. He was covered in it, and it wasn’t dry or dusty or pushing its way past his mask filters to make him cough and sneeze.

“That should do for a while,” the boy said as they scrubbed off in a tiny bathing room. The door, cleverly hidden behind some trailing vines, was next to invisible. Akira guessed it was where he’d popped out of the day they’d first met.

He left, probably to deal with the sprinkler systems or to gather up the trimmings for Morgana. Akira watched water disappear down a drain and thought of the extensive filtration systems that had to sleep under the garden. He pressed his face to the tile, shut his eyes, and listened to the sound of rushing water.

Even the garden could collapse. All the work—the hundreds of years put into it, the careful camouflage, the tinted windows—and it could be gone in an instant.

If he ever discovered someone desecrating it, what would he do?

(He’d be like Ryuji. He’d beat the shit of of anyone who dared. He would have done it months ago—was it a year, now? More than that?—before everything became so… odd.

Yes. Odd. That was a good way to put it.)

He toweled off slowly, wishing there was some way to take the feeling of fresh, clean water trickling down his back to the Ark and on every mission from then on. Not even sweating in the gym room as it slowly turned into a sauna felt this good; not even soaking in the bathhouse in Humphrey’s Peak felt this good.

He wondered what was so different about it. Was it the boy? Was it the garden? Some combination of the two?

On his way out of the garden, he checked on the clover. The boy had said it would either put down roots or it wouldn’t, and every time Akira visited he liked to spend a bit of time with it. It was insane: no one had the time or the energy to sit listlessly next to a plant they didn’t intend to eat, and yet Akira did it anyway. Some small bit of hope kindled in his heart every time he saw that clover clinging stubbornly to life.

As they sat and read after a small dinner consisting mainly of vegetables, Akira found he couldn’t focus on the page. The boy, hunched forward to catch the last bit of light from the window, kept reaching up to tuck his hair back behind his ears. He scowled deeper with every pass of his hand, until he shut the book, stalked off, and then returned with a lantern. With a twist of a dial, he had light and resumed reading, but Akira found himself staring at it.

More tech he’d only ever read about. It was cheaper these days to burn coal—miners found tons of the stuff all the time as sand ate away at mountains and cliffs—since their ancestors had, for one reason or another, balked at it and shunned it in equal measure. Akira supposed they had no need to, outfitted as they’d been with solar panels and wind turbines and dams all generating electricity, and it was the one discrepancy he’d never understood: they’d lived lives of hardship much like Akira’s own, but that had been the one thing they had refused to go without.

“What?” the boy snapped.

Akira hummed, still staring at the lantern. Then he said, “You know, I don’t think we ever introduced ourselves.”

“I had no intention to,” the boy said.

“Because I’m more likely to die before you do, or because you don’t want a name to put on my grave?”

“Because when you eventually spout my little secret from the rooftops, I don’t want to look in your eyes and know who, exactly, I’m shooting.”

“Well, that’s no reason,” Akira laughed, although it had a certain logic to it: it might make a grisly task more bearable, but, “considering how much time we’ve spent together. They say in the absence of words feelings take their place. You might not recall my name, but you’ll remember what we’ve done together.”

“Yes,” the boy said, “and then it will be over.”

He snapped his book shut and stared at the lantern, frowning in thought. He shook his head, paused, then shook it again.

“What?” Akira asked. “Talk to me.”

“It will be over, and then I’ll be forced to endure another lifetime of solitude,” the boy said, after a long while where the lantern buzzed lowly in the silence. There was a heaviness to his words, one that settled squarely on Akira’s shoulders. “Before you, none but my uncle came to visit. I was happy with that. I had Mother and her garden to take care of, and both take up most of my time. I had the house to fix, and clothes to replace or repair. Now I find myself going over the suit as well. Now I find myself wondering how much of my trimmings your beast will eat. Now I find myself wondering what in the world you could be eating out there on the wasteland, where nothing of substance grows.”

Akira wanted to argue that plenty grew out there, but knew it was futile: the Ark had its fingers in too many pots for the boy to be satisfied with that as an answer, and Humphrey’s Peak’s success was largely due to the crest sitting heavy in Akira’s pocket. Instead he smirked across the table. “I’m flattered you care so much about my well-being.”

“Don’t,” the boy snapped again. “I don’t need to see this ruse of yours. You thought something else just now, I’m sure. The rest of the world is clinging to survival; it stands to reason that you’d thrust it in my face. Why not? Because I already knew?”

“Everyone knows,” Akira said, resettling into his armchair. At some point he’d leaned forward, all the better to see the boy’s wine-dark eyes lighten to a molten red, like lava spewed fresh from the earth, in the light cast by the lantern. He cleared his throat. “No need to repeat ad nauseum what everybody already knows, right? And what I didn’t know is that you cared about me that much.”

The boy scowled. He turned to his book, left forgotten in his hand, and set it on the table. He twisted the lantern off, and in the darkness that settled said, “What I care about is that one day you’ll be gone, and I’ll have no damn way of knowing. Everyone leaves that way. I’ve seen so many traders come through Baskar Colony—some I’ve only seen once, others a handful of times—but they never last. They die, or get hurt, or leave the life. And the children, too—I watch them grow up, and start families of their own or set out to find themselves in the wasteland, and then they’re old and dead and _gone_. One day you’ll leave, and you won’t return, and a name only makes it harder to forget.”

Akira couldn’t refute that. There were books that said the average human life was done and gone in the blink of an eye to the long-lived gods and spirits of old Earth; the Elw couldn’t be much better. “Well, I’d still like to know yours.”

The boy shook his head.

“Why not?” Akira asked.

“You simply don’t need to know,” the boy said, standing. He took the lantern with him into the hall, and Akira followed, nearly on his heels.

“Well, why not?” he asked again, letting frustration line his voice. “I can’t keep thinking of you as that Elw boy, the one with the garden. I can’t keep thinking of you as that traveler who brings rare goods to Baskar Colony. Is a name really too much to ask?”

There was a nail on the wall, and the boy hung the lantern from it. Akira thought his ears twitched in the dark, but it was hard to tell. They were both nothing but shadows and the pale flash of skin in the scant light streaming in from the window in the sitting room, and Akira reached blindly for the boy’s arm.

His fingers found cloth, and a warm arm, and the muscles that bunched underneath as he tensed. “I asked you before: what do you want from me?” the boy asked, refusing to turn from the lantern. Akira could hear his ears flit as they worked to take in every sound of the house settling around them and the faint noise of Morgana out in the yard. “You said before you didn’t know, and then you threw on that ruse and tried to joke. I’m not one for jokes. Either say what you mean or leave.”

“And you said before you wouldn’t be able to stand it if I got hurt traveling in the dark,” Akira said, thinking it was odd: at what point during their meetings had Akira’s late-night escapades turned into a concern for the boy? How long had he been holding onto that?

The boy grit his teeth. “Are all Drifters like this? Do they dance around a topic, thinking their coyness a draw? In what world could I ever find such a thing fascinating?”

“Fascinating?” Akira asked, as the boy realized his error and shut his mouth with a snap of teeth. When it became obvious he wasn’t going to elaborate, Akira added, “Do you mean to say you do find it fascinating, but are embarrassed to say so, or that—”

The boy snarled, some wordless, primal noise erupting from his throat as he whirled and smacked Akira’s hand away; Akira swung back, connecting with an arm, then with the planes of his back as he tried to stalk down the hall into the safety of his room. Akira grabbed up shirt and tugged him back. The boy howled, reaching for the hand tangled in his shirt, then pulling away. Akira caught him about the middle as he reached for the hem, and the boy struggled and snarled in his hold.

“Please, I just want to talk,” Akira pleaded, struggling himself to keep his footing. The hall had come alive with creaks and groans and protests as they wrestled with each other; the boy made another wordless cry, dug his heels in, and slammed them into a wall. The whole house seemed to shake; the lantern on its nail clinked.

Reasons darted through Akira’s head as it collided with centuries-old plaster and drywall: the boy shunned affection because it was the last memory of his mother, and he refused to replace her; the boy was terrified of his own feelings and all too aware of what it meant to get attached to a short-lived human; the boy had been hurt, much like young Louise, and had shut his heart away in the aftermath. In the space between his head slamming into the wall and the stars beginning to dance in his vision, he thought of who it could have been, and why, and what purpose it could have possibly served.

Then Akira thought it was a good thing the boy was slightly taller than him, as his free hand jabbed fingers into Akira’s forehead. “Let go!” he cried.

“You’re just going to run again,” Akira said, wincing as a finger stabbed too close to his eye. “You can’t do that forever, you know. Eventually you’re going to have to face it, whatever it is, and it’ll be easier to deal with if we talk about it toge—ow!”

He blinked away tears as a questing finger slammed into his nose; his grip tightened. The boy gave up trying to gouge his eyes out and slammed his head back, connecting solidly with half of Akira’s face; he tried again, and again, each time causing Akira to stumble back into the wall, and each time getting farther from Akira’s nose and the startling pain that would mean his release.

“Talk!” the boy cried, as dust rained down on them. “Talk! With _you_! I never—I never asked for this! I never asked for some Drifter hero to come in and save me from myself! I’m not Mother!”

“I never said you were!” Akira shouted, then clamped his mouth shut. Any one of those headbutts could knock his teeth out, and then he’d have to answer questions.

“Mother might have needed heroes, but I don’t!” the boy insisted. This time Akira stumbled into the wide, raised edge of a doorjamb; it dug into his back and knocked the breath out of him, but he refused to let go.

He couldn’t say that he didn’t want to be a hero—and certainly not the boy’s hero—but the words were lodged in his lungs, along with all the air. He couldn’t seem to get any of it, and he felt, distantly, the wobbling in his knees.

 _Don’t you dare_ , he thought to them, but it was too late: his body, gone slack in that split second, let up just enough that the boy escaped, whirled, and pushed him away.

The ground was an awfully long ways away; he was dimly aware of part of him hitting the floor, and then sliding across it from the force of the boy’s shove, but the rest of him never seemed to get there—until he did, with a sudden, sharp pain in the side of his head.

He thought he heard the boy, over the sound of his own wheezing. Where had the air gone? Why wouldn’t his hands move to investigate that bright, hot spot on his head? What was it tickling his ear? Blood? Spiderwebs? The dust and rot of any of the others who had tried to get close to the boy?

There was a light, so distant it sparkled like a star.

 _Oh_ , Akira thought, and tried to reach for it, but his hands refused to move and his legs refused to work, and really, just that one point was so bright it nearly made him sick to see it. He shut his eyes against the unyielding stare of it, and sank into sleep.

* * *

Far away, in one of the sun-worn lodges the Baskars preferred, Ryuji stirred awake. He tossed and turned for a few minutes, trying to find that vein of sleep once more, but his full bladder sent him down the stairs and out to the privy house. He glared against the brightness of the moon and stars, and startled to find Makoto sitting by the lodge when he returned, frowning at the sky, one hand on her chin.

He shivered at her blood-red gaze, then sprawled out beside her. His suit squeaked and squealed and she frowned deeper at it; Haru picked her way out of the lodge, her hair a snarl of tangles, and settled in on Makoto’s other side. Then Ann came, her suit a brighter, bloodier red; then Futaba, the reflective thread in hers causing it to glow green in patches and shapes. She settled in between Haru’s legs, blearily allowing her hair to be braided. Yusuke was last; he was also the only one that stood, staring out at the Colony: at the large boulder that had been sanded into smoothness by time; at the witch-fires blazing blue by the altar recessed into the mountain; at the strings of frayed horse-hair ropes stretched between the gates shivering in a breeze that kicked sand into their faces.

Futaba asked, “Where’s Joker?”

All of them shrugged at once. The lodge house was large, but not large enough for all of them; the cots went to the girls, and Ryuji and Yusuke slept on the floor, taking up the rest of the room. Akira had liked to sleep by the fire blazing down on the ground level, claiming the heat was all he needed. Ryuji was only just realizing it was a good way to sneak off in the night without anyone knowing; the cots up the stairs creaked and groaned with every bit of movement, until it became second nature to fall asleep to the strangled lullaby.

Over the edge of the mountain, clouds gathered. Thunder rumbled as a heat storm flickered with lightning.

Makoto said, “We should head back inside.”

All of them nodded. Ryuji’s ARM dug into his back as he settled in even further; Yusuke crossed to his side and sat, their knees brushing, his own long ARM left inside. He cradled his katana instead, running his fingers over the silk cords of the tassel.

Haru said, “We have an early start tomorrow.”

All of them nodded again. Akira had stayed out before, but he’d still managed to be on time for their departure in the morning. He’d flashed a bag of ice- and dark-blue gems at them, and laughed and waved them off as they hounded him with questions. Ryuji had a share of them in his suit pocket.

Ann said, with a strained smile: “I’m sure he’ll be on time. He’d hate it if we got in trouble with a late start.”

They shifted as one. Haru brushed hair out of Futaba’s face, then started working on braiding Ann’s, who made the job harder by leaning her head on Haru’s shoulder; Makoto checked her brass knuckles and flexed her hands; Ryuji tapped the side of his ARM. Only Yusuke stayed still as death, staring out at the entrance of Baskar Colony, hoping for a horse and rider to come galloping in with the heat storm on his heels. The clouds were blotting out the moon and stars, until only the witch-fires still burned.

Ryuji said, “He’s prolly with that lover he’s got. He’s safe. This ain’t the first time he’s been gone, yeah? We should—we should get back to bed.”

Futaba curled in, making herself a bed with Haru’s chest as a pillow, and Ryuji fought down jealousy. It looked damn comfortable, but after all that business with her dad and fiance, Haru was sure to turn down any request from a guy. Not even Akira had tried, with all that mess on her plate.

But damn, if Ryuji didn’t want to ask. Anything to ease the jittery feeling crawling into his muscles, like something bad was about to happen. Anything to keep him from jumping up and running out into the storm, like he was a hotshot with something to prove.

 _Don’t be stupid,_ Akira would say. _Think with that brain of yours, you jock._

Yusuke said, “I doubt I’ll be able to find sleep for some time. I’ll stay here a while and keep a lookout, in case he does return.”

They nodded, one last time, but none of them moved. Futaba’s eyes had shut but they jumped around with every beat of thunder; Ann had taken to combing out Haru’s hair, and she winced every time Ann’s fingers snagged on a tangle. Yusuke’s knee was hot against Ryuji’s, and the bottom of Makoto’s boot was cold where it rested on his thigh.

The storm raged overhead, and they bore witness to it.


	7. Justice

Akira stared out at the desert. Like always, it was filled with sand and dust; like always, it ate up the footprints he and his parents left behind, greedy as it was for more men to fill its belly. How many people did the desert have to eat before it was full and satisfied? How many times were he and his parents going to pass by the same rock, acting as if it was the first time every time?

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was a different rock that looked the same. His parents knew better than to walk around in circles; they always said it wasted energy.

His dad’s back was big, bigger than Akira’s arms could hold, and he clung stubbornly to his dad’s neck, pushing his hands up under the scarf protecting his dad’s face.

“Akira,” his dad warned, as Akira brushed his hands along the stubble on his dad’s chin.

“Why not?” Akira asked.

“You can’t cling forever,” his dad said. “You’ll have to grow up someday. We won’t always be here to protect you.”

“But you’re here now,” Akira said. His dad’s stubble was bristly, just long enough to be almost soft to the touch, and it was a different feel from the rest of him: worn-through cloth and worn-smooth leather and the ridges of patches and mends. There wasn’t a single rough spot on him, except for his stubble. Akira almost said he couldn’t help but run his hands over it, but he knew that would be a sure way to lose his spot for good.

“But not always, Akira,” Akira’s mom said, wiping sweat from her eyes, then reaching over to do the same for her husband. “Your father’s right: one day you’ll grow up and have a family of your own to protect, and we won’t be there to help you. What will you do then? Cling to them and pray?”

Akira frowned, then found himself on his feet on the rock they’d passed a dozen times or more. His dad adjusted his hat and scarf, then did the same for Akira. He was aware, now, of a faint tremor under his feet. An earthquake. The inner sand-sea must have eaten more of the continent, and the rest of it strained and grieved the loss.

The sun sat right behind his parents; they were nothing more than shadows in the light, shapeless and formless, but there was his mom’s braid falling out of its crown, and there was his dad’s yellow scarf, and all the loose bits quivered and shook in a breeze. The shaking under his feet only grew worse.

“Akira,” his dad said, “what have prayers gotten any of us?”

Akira shoved his hands in his pockets. His fingers touched the rough-smooth surface of the crest, ran across the ridges of the fossilized bones of an ancient turtle. The sky grew dark; his parents grew darker and more indistinct. “Are you leaving me?” Akira asked them.

“Oh, Akira,” his mom said. “If only we didn’t have a choice, dear. We’d stay with you forever. But you have to go, and live, and grow up. You have to face the consequences of what you’ve done.”

“What I’ve done?” Akira asked.

His parents nodded. Without warning, a gray-brown wave of water smashed into them, washing them away. All around his rock, water gushed and flowed in a never-ending torrent. Akira stared at the place his parents had been to the place they’d been swept away to and back. Water slapped his face.

Then he woke up, gritting his teeth against the headache screaming in his temples and the light streaming in the window. Morgana shoved his head through the open window and slobbered on him, and Akira raised a hand to brush his nose. Velvet-soft, with more fine hairs than Akira had ever felt.

He would have laid there longer, if the duvet wasn’t stiflingly hot and he was sweating straight through it. The pounding headache must have been dehydration; his thick tongue swore it was.

It took him a few tries to move, then to swing his legs over the side of the bed and sit up. His head swam, and he groaned at the dizziness that made him consider crawling back under, but it was light out, and bright enough that dawn had to have come and gone hours ago. His stomach complained.

He groaned at it. Morgana whinnied with sympathy.

There was a pitcher and a glass by the bed, and Akira took the one and ignored the other, sure that if he tried to pour his hands would slip. He sipped and waited, and sipped and waited, and gradually the black spots his vision cleared up and his stomach felt less restless and more patient, and he could finally drag himself to his feet.

The farmhouse had a whole room just for the privy and bath, and Akira took his time getting there and took his time inside. Morgana paced the side of the house, complaining; Akira made noises right back, too worn out to talk.

The house was quiet. It creaked and groaned all around him, and somewhere the breeze whistling in through the open windows found a crack in the siding and shrilled; Akira plugged his ears against the noise and stumbled into the kitchen. A pot steamed on the stove—boiled and mashed vegetables, sweetened with berries of all kinds, the color so dark it was almost black—and Akira helped himself, settling down on the floor where it was cool and the light was dim.

It tasted awful, but it brought back the vents of the night before: Akira stupidly insisting that he and the boy could sit down and talk, even though the boy didn’t want to. The fight, where Akira had stupidly caught him up and refused to let go, even with thoughts of Louise and Haru bouncing around in his head. The long, long fall; the pinprick of light, as bright as a star.

Akira tilted his head back and winced as he hit the table; he couldn’t be dead, since he felt like shit, but he’d been so sure—and the dream, too. His parents, swept away by the tide of years on the ocean of sand, and Akira nearly jumping in after them, determined to chase them down.

Maybe Akira had been closer to dying than he thought.

He forced down another bite. Something slammed onto the table—not Morgana, who was watching balefully through the window over the sink—and the boy said, “Ah. You’re awake now, I see.”

Akira nodded, not trusting his too-thick tongue to form words. His head swam long after he stopped; the boy knelt down, pinched Akira’s chin between his fingers, and pushed his head around.

 _A concussion_ , Akira thought. _That’s why my head hurts and I feel so awful._

“I wasn’t sure if you were going to pull through or not,” the boy said, prodding a finger at the tender lump on the side of Akira’s skull. It ached, the way all lumps on the head did, and Akira forced down another spoonful. The boy took notice and grabbed for the bowl. “And this is not for eating,” he said, dumping it back into the pot with a long-suffering sigh.

Akira made a noise he hoped was questioning enough to get an answer.

“It’s monster bait,” the boy said, fiddling around with whatever was on the table. Akira guessed vegetables. “I set it out along with a trap, and they die. How else do you think I’ve kept the area clear for so long?”

By shooting them, Akira thought—but the boy had never pulled an ARM out, not even on their venture to the Ruins of Memory. The tiger crest could be a weapon, Akira supposed, if it did the same things his did, but an ARM was simply quicker and easier, once the synchronization process was over. He’d left it strapped to his belt, leaving Akira to do all the work.

“Go sit on the couch,” the boy said. He nudged Akira with a foot.

Akira did so slowly. He endured a longer, far more thorough examination, drank more water than his stomach had ever known, and ate a decent amount of vegetable mash. When he woke the next morning, he was back in the room with the bed under the window, another gentle breeze wafting in, Morgana’s concerned eye trained on him.

“Hey there,” he croaked out, his voice like a bucket of rusty nails being scraped together. Morgana’s nose was still velvet-soft, and his breath when he snorted into Akira’s hands was warm. He danced with nerves on the other side of the wall. Akira laughed, which set his head to aching again.

Three days wasn’t so long. He hoped his team had headed back to the Ark on time—there wasn’t any need for any of them to get hit with Shido’s evil eye, not while Akira was still around—if only so Sojiro and the others didn’t worry.

But four days was long. He took a long walk around the house, stepped outside for an hour or two to sit in the sun and sweat off his headache, Morgana lipping at his hair. Akira patted his flanks, then sat there trying to work up the energy to go back inside, and the boy had to drag him to his feet and to the couch.

“This isn’t an ordinary concussion, is it?” Akira asked, talking slow so his voice didn’t slur.

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know,” the boy said. Akira heard his shrug more than saw it. “Mother and my uncle never got them, and I’ve certainly never hit my head that hard. I’ve been looking for all the signs the books say should be there, but… you’d be more an expert on that, I think.”

“You do, huh,” Akira mumbled.

The boy pressed a cool glass of water into his hands. “Schturdark’s crest can be used for its healing powers as well as its offensive capabilities. I used it to heal you, but I couldn’t be sure if it would truly work or not, and it’s possible the crest drew the needed energy from you.”

“I didn’t feel this bad killing those Blobs in the ruins,” Akira told him.

The boy did shrug then. He pressed his fingers around the lump, noting the decreased swelling. His hands were wet, and cool to the touch, and Akira leaned into it.

“Are we going to talk about why we had that fight in the first place?” Akira asked.

The boy’s lips thinned. He scanned the kitchen and the sitting room for some other urgent task, but Akira caught him by the wrist before he could dart away again. “Please,” he added.

The boy fixed him with a steely stare; it was like staring at a cliff as it rose out of the sandsea, solid and impenetrable. “I told you why. You refused to listen.”

“Maybe I don’t think that’s any way to live.” The boy’s pulse was fast under his fingers, but he didn’t pull away. Akira’s grip, like the rest of him, was slow to recover; if the boy wanted to, he could get away and out of the house faster than Akira could get off the couch. “Even the Elw weren’t solitary creatures. They had friends and families and lovers. They loved just the same as humans did, and had need for other people. That’s just the way we are.”

“Perhaps I’m tired of mourning,” the boy said.

“Aren’t we all,” Akira agreed. He shut his eyes and laid back, taking his hand with him. No more chasing, no more catching—he could try all he wanted, but if the boy didn’t want to meet him even halfway, that was fine. He was done. “Life’s already hard enough on us without insisting we can do it all alone. You can’t get those Antidote vines trimmed without help, right? That’s all I mean.”

It wasn’t, but it was the easiest way to put it. Maybe the boy wouldn’t understand, otherwise.

He dozed on and off, and every time he turned to face the window the boy was there in Akira’s armchair, reading one book or another, apparently done with his chores for the day. Sometimes Akira swore he was watching him, eyes peering out over the edge of a book or through his bangs, his ears constantly twitching. Morgana paced the house, more impatient and anxious than any horse had a right to be.

Once his headache was gone, Akira would head back to Baskar Colony. He’d find a way to make it up to them for taking the horse for so long, and ask after his team, and maybe stay a while in Jolly Roger or the Ruins of Memory—the gems he’d gotten last time were as good as gold and traded for far more. Shido wouldn’t complain if he brought back a bag or two or those and some glass shards. Whatever punishment Akira got for abandoning his post would have to be lessened, then.

Shido might not like traitors and slackers, but he’d probably turn a blind eye if Akira brought back results. Probably. It was always hard to tell with the man.

And, after all this, he’d find a way to make it up to his team.

* * *

Akira woke halfway through a nap days later to Morgana whining beyond the window. He snorted and complained and tugged at Akira’s shirt with his teeth until Akira was forced to get up and do something about him; at this time of day the boy was usually in the garden, oblivious to the outside world.

Akira stumbled out of the house; Morgana met him by the door and pranced, refusing to stand still. Akira was long since past watching a stout draft horse act like it was one of its long-legged cousins, and he patted Morgana’s neck and scrubbed sleep from his eyes and then noticed the tracks in the dirt at his feet. A large group had tracked dust and sand up to the door, circled the house, and then scattered around the area.

Akira stumbled back into the house, slipped into his suit and mask, and buckled on his weapons belt. His ARM came alive in his hand, nearly vibrating with anticipation.

“Shh, I know,” he told it, realizing at once that he missed the weight of it in his hand and how eager it was to be used.

 _An ARM is meant to be shot_ , Akira’s father had once said. _Don’t hold it unless you mean to use it._

And as eager as it was to be used, Akira hoped it wouldn’t come to that. It was likely monsters that had roamed into the yard, then scattered after a tussle with Morgana—but the horse was unhurt, racing across the yard to the garden, butting his head against the door control. It hissed open.

The small, still tender lump on his head throbbed. Akira took a deep breath, let it out, then stepped inside. Morgana began dancing with agitation as the door slid shut behind him; Akira strained to pick out anything beyond the next door, and his suit picked up nothing but the buzzing of the lights overhead and the air running through the vents.

It was going to be nothing, he told himself. It was going to be nothing, and he would be defiling the garden again over some paranoid delusion brought about by his concussion. Or, even better: he was dreaming, he was still asleep in the boy’s mother’s room, with her vanity of brushes and empty bottles of perfume at the foot of the bed and the chest of drawers filled with crumbling clothes and the faint musty scent of her blankets, all of it preserved like a shrine, as if the boy was expecting her to wake up any moment and crawl out of the dirt in the garden.

The hiss of air through his mask and the vibrating ARM in his hand told him he wasn’t dreaming. Akira took another breath—it was going to be _nothing_ —and stepped through.

He was hit immediately with a high wailing sound, one that choked and cut off as the door slid shut. He took in Fox, in the corner by the Antidote vines, the goggles of Oracles’s bug-eyed mask glowing red as she cowered behind him; Skull had the boy pinned to the floor, his rusted pruning shears just out of reach of a grasping hand. Noir and Queen knelt in the dirt, picking through it the way Akira had months and months ago, Panther standing over them, keeping watch with her arms crossed, as if she didn’t want to be there.

“Joker,” one of them said, but he was already crossing to Skull and the boy. His ARM clicked once, ready to fire, as he leveled it at the tuft of hair poking out of the back of Skull’s mask.

Skull looked at him out of the corner of his eye. The boy’s face was pressed into the floor, but he hadn’t been expecting an ambush—his red half-mask was forgotten, and his ears twitched. His shirt was sodden, covered with a mixture of mud and stains, and several plants nearby had been crushed as they wrestled for dominance. Several unripe gourds had split open, spilling seeds.

“Joker, don’t,” Panther said.

Akira said nothing, pressing the ARM harder into the opening.

The red glare in the corner disappeared as Oracle cowered further.

His mask pinged with messages, requests, warnings; Akira blinked them all away, feeling his frown deepen. How dare they, he thought.

“Dude, c’mon,” Skull muttered, but whether he was asking for Akira to fire already or let off, Akira wasn’t sure. He pressed harder. Queen stood, brushing rich dirt off her gloves. Noir continued to fondle the leaves of a berry plant, rubbing them between her filthy fingers, and Akira understood, now, how the boy felt that first time.

“Joker, you don’t want to do this,” Queen said, hands raised, placating. “We—we were worried. You didn’t come back by the time we left the Colony, you weren’t there or at Jolly Roger when we returned… Oracle didn’t want to tell us, but we made her. We couldn’t find you in the house—”

“Don’t lie,” he said, and was surprised by how calm he sounded. Rage flowed under his skin and through his veins like a torrent. How dare they. “I was sleeping right next to a window. You circled the house; you should have seen me. Fucking liar.”

That made them all pause. He could hear Oracle begin to cry, clinging to Fox’s back like a burr; Fox himself stood still as a statue, without even a finger twitch to betray what he was thinking.

He was probably trying to decide who to side with: his team, who had come to support him in place of Madarame, or Akira, who had shot the man and proved to be as flighty as all Drifters were.

“We looked for you,” Panther insisted, the only one to break the silence. “We did. Maybe we just—just didn’t see you. The windows were pretty dirty. We could have gone in, but—”

Akira remembered doing much the same: deciding that it wasn’t worth the risk of angering some hermit by barging into his house. Instead he’d gone for the garden. It would have been nice to think that his team followed the same logic, except all he could think was that it was defiled, now. Crushed underfoot, without a care in the world. “Shut up,” he said.

Panther reeled back with shock. Queen caught her arm to steady her; a throbbing ache settled into Akira’s head. _Do it_ , his ARM said, impatient.

His finger touched the trigger. Oracle wailed; a fine mist sprayed from the sprinklers.

Noir said, “It’s such a beautiful garden. I can see why you would have hidden it, even from us.” She tugged her mask off; the mist settled on her hair like spidersilk, fine and glimmering. When she turned she was crying, tears dripping down her face. “Ark protocol would have this whole place razed to the ground for its secrets. That’s why you did it, Joker. I understand that. There’s more buried here than ancient seeds; there’s more to this foundation than dirt and bones.”

She crossed the garden, picking her way over the paths to stand directly over the boy, his face still pressed into the dirt, his teeth grit with resignation and anger. She knelt in front of him, carding her fingers through his hair. She wasn’t wearing gloves. “How many people did your mother murder?” she asked him. “How many people did she drag into her bed and slaughter, all so you could live?”

The boy growled out something that sounded like, “Never.”

Noir ignored it. “All so you could live, and continue to nurture her garden. It’s very beautiful, yes, and I can feel the love in each stem and vein. You love this garden, and this garden loves you—but you aren’t willing to kill for it, are you? Perhaps you found some poor Drifter hurt on the road, and brought him here, but nature took him before you did. Is it somehow different when an Elw kills for their garden, than when the planet takes them? Is that what you planned to do with Joker?”

 _Do it_ , Akira’s ARM insisted, more pressing than before.

“I’ve never,” the boy at Noir’s feet insisted. “Never, _never_. And don’t tell me she did, either!”

There was a scraping noise, metal against the stone of the path, and it was all the warning any of them received before the boy swung his shears up, slamming them into the side of Skull’s face. Akira, startled, let loose a whole chamber into flesh. Someone screamed, and Skull was cradling his head with one arm while the other dangled, blood darkening his bright-yellow gloves.

The boy pushed himself to his feet, shears dropping from his hand. Blood blossomed at his shoulder and ran in rivulets down his back, and he tripped over Akira, ARM still poised to fire.

Akira blinked, got to his feet, and tugged the boy up.

Panther rushed over to Skull, already tugging the restoratives out of a pack at her waist. She trampled plants in her wake, and Akira followed her with his ARM, confused as to why it wasn’t firing anymore.

“Joker,” Noir said, as the boy tugged him out of the garden, “are you sure?”

Sure of what? He wanted to ask, but the door slid shut between them, and then they were out in the bright, dusty air of the outside world, Morgana dancing next to them as they raced for the farmhouse.

Akira stood just inside the door as the boy raced around the house, tugging on his suit and mask and hissing through the pain in his shoulder. Something square-shaped was pressed into Akira’s free hand: the turtle crest, now smeared with blood, bright and brilliant even in the dim light of the hall. When the boy was done, there were a new variety of odds and ends tucked into the belt at his waist: a steel cylinder; the old, bulky ARM; the lantern; a canteen. The bag at his back was heavy with food.

“Are you going somewhere?” he asked.

“Do you really think I can stay here, now?” the boy snapped, circling in place. He raced back to his room and came back out with the tiger crest shoved into a pocket.

“It didn’t sound like they’d do anything to you,” he said.

“That doesn’t _matter_ ,” the boy said. “Are you coming with me, or are you staying with—with them?”

“But the garden—”

“It doesn’t matter!” the boy roared. “They’ll come back and they’ll rip it up and I’ll—I’ll be—I’ll have nothing! Are you coming or not?”

Akira couldn’t see his eyes behind his mask. Unlike most of his team’s, which had clear goggles, the boy’s employed a dark-colored visor that shone red like blood in the light. He imagined the boy’s eyes anyway: wild, wide-eyed with fear, unable to focus on any one thing at a time. “Do you really want me to? You didn’t want me to stay, before.”

“Must we do this _now_?” This time he imagined a darting glance to the door just behind him.

“Yeah,” Akira said, holstering his ARM. He’d figure out why it stopped firing later, and holding onto something made his head stop spinning.

The boy shifted in place, and after a long minute, said, “You know that world better than I do. If I want to stay hidden from the Ark and that—those people, then I’ll need someone to guide me.” He huffed, crossed his arms, then added, “Please.”

Akira hummed, considering. Shido definitely wouldn’t be happy now that he’d shot his own teammate, and the boy was begging him. He’d never done that before, making everything seem like an order just waiting to be fulfilled.

And after the events in the garden, Akira doubted the relationships between him and his team would be the same. Something—the old bones buried in the dirt, the boy’s mother’s bloodlust, the concussion—had him acting all out of sorts. There was no explaining it, and Akira refused to make his team watch him descend into a spiral of madness.

Akira patted his belt—knife, ARM, the pack of miscellaneous odds and ends like the gems and his spare filters, the bullet case. “Well, since you said please,” he said.

“Good,” said the boy. “I know a way out that doesn’t require jumping that ridiculous crevasse. Have that beast of yours follow me.”

“But Morgana’s a good horse,” Akira protested, even as he did as he was told.

* * *

By the time Chihaya stopped giving him funny looks every time they passed each other by in the lounge of Lala’s saloon, Akira’s headache was more or less gone. It had been a long, strenuous two weeks holed up in a private room paid for with the last of the boy’s fresh vegetables, but Lala hadn’t complained, and the only grievance Ohya had aired was the lack of a drinking buddy on her long stints in the lounge.

Ohya really did take to her booze. Akira could smell her all the way down the hall—not that any of the sailors passing by were any better, and Max in his corner shied away from all of them, his skirts quaking in their wake.

All these years and the boy was still afraid. Akira almost felt sorry for him.

He strained to pick up the conversation out on the street—just as he’d been ready to march out the door for an evening walk, a head of bright, white hair passed by. He’d stopped right next to the boy, and they’d been talking ever since in low tones that were next to impossible to pick up without his mask’s microphones chipping in. Something about being surprised to see each in other in stinking Jolly Roger. Something about the boy not deciding on a whim to become a sailor. Something about not visiting the garden again.

“So someone’s found out, then,” the uncle said. His voice sounded strange, even through the microphones. There was a tinny quality to it, as if he was talking into a tin can.

“You knew?” the boy asked.

“Hard not to,” was the answer. “Everybody does what they can. Florina never would have done it herself, but she knew it was one way to keep the garden going. Prayers only got it so far.”

“Was it really for me?”

Silence. Akira struggled to smother the urge to look out the door. Finally, the uncle sighed. “Who knows,” he said. “Clarina loved you to death. Maybe that’s what drove her to it. Love makes us all do terrible things to each other. I’ll drop by when I can, try to salvage a bit. There’s no need for you to lose everything, after all.”

“I already have.”

“I think you’d be surprised what a few mementos can do,” the uncle said. “Got anything in mind you didn’t grab on your way out?”

“No,” said the boy. “It all—all of it, the books and furniture and—and everything… It can burn, for all I care. Let the Ark have it all. What will they learn? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Because his mother’s bones laid in the garden, and soon it would be gone.

“What will you do now, then?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said. “Travel, I suppose. I—I made a friend, at the end. He’s inside. Perhaps you two could meet someday.”

“Travel, huh,” the uncle said, more to himself then to the boy, and Akira could picture him staring out at the sandsea, at the waves licking the metal-sheet shore of Jolly Roger’s bay. He was probably reminiscing over his own times traveling with a happy-go-lucky bunch, unaware of the trouble around every bend. “If you’re going to be doing that, then we’ll run into each other sooner or later. I take up plenty of jobs. Hopefully we won’t wind up rivals.”

“Rivals. With you? We’d be no match.”

“You think that now, Goro, but you’ll see someday what a team can do for you.”

“A team, hm,” the boy muttered, almost too low for the microphones to pick up. Whatever he said next was lost in a bray of laughter from a group of passing sailors. Akira looked up, noted Max still quaking in his corner, and waved him over.

Goro, he thought. It almost felt like cheating, overhearing it like that. He let Max take a seat at the table and did the usual questioning: was Lala taking care of him alright? Were the sailors being too rowdy or too rough or not adhering to the rules? Were Ohya and Chihaya fighting too much?

Max gave his usual answers: Lala was treating him just fine, none of the sailors seemed to care that he and Lala were boys in skirts—and if they did, Lala tossed them out on their heads—and Ohya and Chihaya had settled into a stony silence around each other that everyone knew stemmed from Ohya’s drinking habits. Then he flushed and added that Lala was teaching him to shave.

“What’ll I do if I grow out of ‘em?” Max said, shaking his skirts.

“Stop, maybe,” Akira said, knowing it was futile. Trousers and breeches and denim jeans—they all scratched and bit at the scars along Max’s legs until walking was agony. His full, flouncing skirts were the only things that didn’t. Akira suspected the root cause of it was not having to feel the chunks that had been taken out of him; Gobs were never picky with where their meat came from. They ate everything.

But Max nodded, a thoughtful look stealing over his face. Maybe, his expression said—if Lala didn’t mind, because Lala had given him everything he had and never asked for much in return.

Outside, the crackle of conversation stopped. Akira chanced a look out the door and saw the uncle patting the boy’s shoulder, his voice now low enough to be drowned out by the tide. The boy nodded, then the uncle nodded, and before he walked off he took one look at the saloon.

His eyes really were purple as poison, and murky enough to show the wear of years. Akira wondered if they had ever been clear with innocence—not likely. He looked like the type of person who’d been out on his own in the wasteland for his entire life. Maybe he had. Maybe, like Akira, he’d been raised on sand and dust and the wide blue sky.

Then he blinked, and the uncle was gone, the ends of his scarves trailing in his wake. The boy made his way to the saloon, and Akira ducked back into his seat in time for the door to swing open. Max jumped to his feet and hurried away; the boy eyed him until he ducked into the kitchen.

“I suppose you’re feeling better,” the boy said.

“Not so shaky anymore, so, yes,” Akira said.

“Good, then,” the boy said. “My uncle has an old sandship docked in the harbor. He says we can have it, if we like. Apparently the Ark hasn’t managed to craft one better since, and he’s come across dozens of them. Shipwrecked, destroyed by monsters, swallowed by the sands—”

“Doesn’t he need it to get out of town?”

“He assured me he has ways to travel without it,” the boy said, trying to brush dust off his front and failing. “My concern is whether that beast of yours will allow itself to be loaded on like cargo. Unless you mean to send it back to the Colony?”

“Hard to say,” Akira said. There were plenty of places that were inaccessible without bridges—or horses to jump the wide gap of a yawning crevasse. A sandship was only useful if there was a nearby beach, but as the sandsea grew larger, it claimed more and more of the soft beaches the ships needed to port in.

“We can’t exactly feed it,” the boy said, softly.

“Or water him,” Akira added. He tugged his lip between his teeth, thinking. If only Yuuki had gotten done that device, they wouldn’t need the horse, but Akira had never taken the chance to ask after it again. “And he is Colony property. I’d hate to be branded a thief alongside traitor.”

“If you haven’t already,” the boy said, shifting. He was still staring at the kitchen—and Lala was staring back, lips pursed. Akira stood, grabbed the boy by the arm, and tugged him upstairs to their private little room. At one point it had been a closet, barely big enough for a slew of cleaning supplies—Akira spotted the bleach stain on the floor, and the boy wrinkled his nose every time he walked inside. Now it was cramped, with the bed taking up most of the space, and a table resting at the foot of it that ensured that no one could ever get the door open all the way.

Akira shouldered his way inside, pulled his mask off, and set it on the bed. The boy leaned against the door, thumb catching at the bottom of his helmet until it rested on the table. The boy shook his head, hair flying; drops of sweat hit the walls. His lip curled.

“So, what do we do now?” Akira asked.

“I shouldn’t have asked you to come with me,” the boy said abruptly. “You have a team. A life. What happened at the greenhouse—in the garden—could be chalked up to concussive confusion. You weren’t yourself.” He eyed Akira. “I think it’s safe to say you still aren’t.”

“I’d rather speak for myself on that matter, if we meet anyone who asks,” Akira said. It wouldn’t be very many people: Ark inquisitors; his team; Sae and her colleagues in human resources. That worked in his favor, since he had no idea what to say. It was a blood-smeared, shadow-tinted time, one that he doubted he would ever remember in full. “And if it matters, I would have been happy to become a part of that garden.”

“After years and years of harassing me,” the boy said, with a long, slow shudder.

“No,” Akira said. “From the first day. If you’d killed me then, I would have been happy knowing I fed something so lovely… Provided my ghost learned of it.”

“There you go again with that ruse of yours,” the boy sighed. He sagged against the door. One claw-tipped hand raked a scratch along the underside of his jaw; the other drummed a staccato beat against the wood.

“But it’s true,” Akira said. “It’s what I’ve always wanted: a green garden. Just one spot on the whole damn planet that can grow something without the Ark stepping in to hold its hand.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No one ever said it did.”

He sighed again. Now that he wasn’t propping himself up with secrets, the boy looked so… young, and beaten down. He’d lost everything, in a single instant—and the worst part was that as far as either of them knew, the house and the garden were still standing. They could still go back and make a stand attempting to take it back.

But they both knew it was futile.

Akira couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Is that why you couldn’t give me an answer? Because you thought love meant killing for your garden?”

“Don’t be absurd,” the boy said, but he couldn’t meet Akira’s gaze.

“I’m not being absurd,” Akira said. “I’m asking a question. If you don’t want to answer it, you should just say so.”

For a few long moments, the only sound was the boy trying to speak, then thinking better of it. Then he said, “You’re saying you love me.”

Akira stopped himself halfway through a shrug. He loved a lot of people: his team and his friends, everyone who had wormed their way into his heart, one way or another. But the boy was different, somehow, as if all of Akira’s other loves were insubstantial next to him. Was it because he was the last survivor of an extinct race? Was it because he was exotic, with his strange ears?

Was it just because he was Elw, and tied more closely to the planet than Akira could ever hope to be? Had Akira’s Drifter blood latched onto that connection and refused to let go?

Before he could answer, the boy added, “Mother never gave her name to the men she brought home. I never asked how they made the long journey from one of the settlements to our little house, either. You’d think someone would protest, with all that distance, but it was—it was like they were intoxicated, so drunk on her that they couldn’t say no and that they didn’t care how long the journey was. She could have taken them to the ends of the earth, and they would have followed. I kept thinking you came back because of that draw. That perhaps I had it, too, and the only way to make you stop would be to bleed you dry in the garden, and that made me think of you saying my name as your last breath wheezed out of your lungs.”

A draw, huh—it would explain the rage Akira had felt, seeing the boy pinned to the ground. Akira couldn’t be killed if his would-be murderer was helpless, after all, and yet Akira had hesitated to pull the trigger. The one meant to fire in that space was the boy, and Akira hadn’t wanted to hurt Ryuji. Not really.

Well, he thought so. In the moment… he could have been thinking anything. It was hard to tell if he’d been thinking of anything at all.

Akira shifted on his feet, shoved his hands under his belt, and asked, “You think the garden has the draw? That could be it. Not you, or your mother, but your garden—and since you work in it so much, it’s rubbed off on you.”

The boy shrugged. “Me, or Mother, or the garden—it doesn’t matter now. I don’t plan on returning to it anytime within your lifetime, that’s for certain. In another century or two, when I’m going old and gray, perhaps—but not now. Not when there’s a chance your Ark is going to tear it into pieces.”

“Not my Ark anymore,” Akira reminded him.

“So you say,” the boy said, still disbelieving. “By all rights, you should go back, explain yourself, and—”

“And leave you to flounder on your own on the wasteland? You wouldn’t last a year.” Akira couldn’t believe this. He’d dragged himself here, hadn’t he? He’d laid up in bed like a good boy recovering, hadn’t he? He’d shot his own damn teammate, hadn’t he? “And those old-style sandships take more than one person to man. You’ll need the help if you want to use it.”

The boy scowled, but it didn’t seem as deep as it had before. More like he’d resigned himself to the outcome, to Akira traveling beside him, unwanted or not. He crossed his arms and stared at the bleach stain on the floor, and there was that vulnerability again, like all Akira had to do was press and he would fold.

“Let me help you,” Akira told him, and took a bit of pride in the boy’s glance of hope. “And you’ll help me. That’s what it means to be a team—we look out for each other. And before we go any farther—”

He broke off, tugging a bright-red glove off with his teeth. Not exactly hygienic, but it was easier than the slip-and-slide of glove friction—they were designed to keep the sweat and water inside, even if the water went nowhere and never worked its way into a filtration tank—and he knew how slick his hand was with sweat as he held it between them. Skin on skin, just like the boy liked.

If he accepted. If Akira wasn’t making a fool of himself.

“I’m Akira Kurusu, Drifter by blood, ex-Ark surveyist,” Akira said.

The boy stared for a moment, then shook himself. His suit’s gloves were attached, and he slithered out of the top half of his suit just to meet his hand, skin-on-skin, just like he liked. There was a small, pleased smile on his face as he reached over, his palm just as slick and clammy yet tanned against Akira’s own bone-pale skin. His ears flared and twitched, taking in the muffled laughter of sailors down in the lounge and on the street and the clamor of the shipyard and, maybe, Akira’s heart racing in his chest. One day Akira would ask how well he could hear with those ears of his.

“Goro Akechi,” the boy said, sounding as if he wasn’t quite sure of it, as if it had been ages and not mere minutes since someone dear to him had said his name. It half-sounded as if he was reading it from a script, or out of a book. “The last Elw on this dying, rotten world. Ex-keeper of a bloodthirsty garden. I’m… looking forward to working with you.”

“You should be,” Akira said. “I’m a pro.”


	8. Epilogue: The Fool

By the time they left the garden, Akira and the strange boy were gone, the wind come and gone and obscuring their tracks. The farmhouse wasn’t the mess she thought it would be—it was pleasant, lived in, with overstuffed chairs and a couch in the sitting room and a well-stocked kitchen that dripped dried herbs from the ceiling. Books with faded, tired spines sat on bookshelves in nearly every room. There was an array of knives, spotted with rust, in a drawer in the large master bedroom where the sheets smelled like Akira and the pillow was spotted with blood stains.

The second bedroom—smaller, but cozier, just as well-lived-in as the rest of the house—was done up like a child’s. She righted a few of the rag dolls on the shelf above the desk, then picked one up and carried it with her into the sitting room.

No one spoke of the giant hole in the floor just across the hall, or the tools and lumber scattered around to fix it. There was blood on the floor there, too. Haru could only guess why.

“So,” she said, once everyone was seated, Ryuji with his arm cradled close to his chest. Makoto had dug the bullets out and bandaged him up as best she could, and he kept staring at his hand, flexing it like he couldn’t believe it still worked.

First his leg, now his arm—she wanted to sigh.

“What do we do now?” Ann asked, watching Ryuji stare at his hand.

“Go back to the Ark, I suppose,” Makoto said. “I… don’t think Akira’s coming back. Shido will need to be notified. If we’re very unlucky, he’ll disband us permanently.”

“No,” Futaba whimpered from her seat in the corner. The gunshot had startled her, but not more than Akira, snarling and pushing the barrel of his ARM into Ryuji’s head.

“If we’re only mildly unlucky, he won’t, but he’ll want to know the hows and whys of Akira’s… abandonment.”

“But it’s simple, isn’t it,” Haru said. “He died. He went to visit his paramour, got into a skirmish or fell into a crevasse, and didn’t make it out. Veteran Drifters die by unlucky coincidences all the time. Shido will think it’s about time.”

“I don’t like it,” Ann said.

“I don’t either, but it’s all we’ve got,” Makoto said. “All this blood—if he hit his head, it would explain his actions, wouldn’t it? So—so he was hurt. That much is true. And he might have died if we hadn’t intervened.”

The boy, when they’d entered the greenhouse, hadn’t seemed surprised—not at first, not until he’d turned just as Ryuji had tackled him to the floor. He’d been used to Akira coming and going, had likely been expecting him to make his way over.

And then what? What would he have done after?

“Yes, he might have,” Haru said, though the lack of Akira’s presence was almost as good as death itself. “And I know it hurts to say it, but… we were prepared for this. For him leaving, for any reason, at any time. Weren’t we?”

She looked around the group. Makoto, his childhood friend, with her face pinched tight with worry; Ryuji next to her, shaking his head at the way he’d parted with his best friend; Yusuke, who had stopped leafing through a book he’d pulled from the shelves to stare blankly at the pages. Haru didn’t know all that had gone on between them, but it was deep, whatever it was. Futaba in her corner, tugging at her hair; Akira had been the one to convince her to leave her room, weaving tales of the wasteland she’d journeyed with her mother into stories of perseverance. Ann in the chair by the window, crying silently.

She stared at the tabletop for a moment, squeezing the rag doll. Prepared never truly meant prepared, and while their minds had told them one thing, their hearts had wished for another.

But a lifetime with Akira wasn’t feasible—not now, and not from the outset. He was a Drifter. He wasn’t meant to stay.

They sat in silence for a while, stewing in their own personal hurts, indulging their own what-ifs. Then Makoto squared her shoulders and said, “I’ll take over for Akira. I’ll tell Shido I’m the new proposed captain, and that the rest of you won’t follow anyone else. Shido’s too smart to break down one of his best survey teams over a leadership dispute, and he has to know we won’t follow anyone he assigns.”

“Damn straight,” Ryuji said, then grunted in pain.

Yusuke grunted. It could have been agreement.

Ann mopped up her tears and grinned.

Only Futaba said, “But what if he doesn’t allow it?”

“He has to,” Haru said. “Part of Father’s deal with the Ark requires me out on the field on a survey team”—for frequent visits, so he knew she was doing well under someone else’s care—“and we all know that Akira led the best. _We_ are the best. Shido won’t cut us off or break us up because we can’t work in any other team. With no offense, I doubt Ryuji or Yusuke would follow anyone else’s orders.”

“Hardly offensive,” Yusuke said.

“And I doubt any of the other teams would allow Ann the time to mourn at Shiho’s grave.”

“They take that from me, I’ll shoot them myself,” Ann said, with a scowl.

“And Futaba—you’re already terrified of most people. Imagine being surrounded by strangers, having orders thrown at you left and right, without a shred of sympathy or concern for your well-being. That’s how the other teams operate, and they fail regularly. Shido has complained on more than one occasion of having to find new members for them. We’re the best because we’ve lasted so long without that. Let’s continue to _be_ the best.”

Makoto chuckled. “Are you sure you don’t want the position yourself?”

“Oh, no,” Haru said, then bit her lip. “I’m decent enough at leading, but I can’t make quick, informed decisions like you can, Makoto. I dither too much. And—and I…”

“It’s the garden, isn’t it,” Makoto guessed.

“Yes,” Haru said. She could already picture herself back among the green of the garden: the fruit trees, carefully pruned to prevent brushes with the ceiling; the vines in the corners; the neat, labeled rows of ground tubers and berry bushes and gourds; the plastic trellises holding up tomatoes and beans. “It’s used to someone taking care of it. Without anyone here, it might become overgrown, and if the Ark finds it… It just feels like a waste.”

“Something as large as that would be quite a handful for one person alone,” Yusuke said. “That boy must have been working on it every day of his life. You can’t possibly mean to say you’ll pop in every now and then, as Akira did, and work on it.”

“Well,” she said, but couldn’t find an argument: that had been what she was planning to do. But it _was_ a large garden, and it would take her some time to fall into a good rhythm for taking care of it.

“I’ll do it,” Ryuji said.

“You?” Ann asked, eyes going wide.

“Yeah, me,” Ryuji asserted. He shrugged, then winced. “You know me. I’m a hothead. Can’t keep my mouth shut ‘bout anything important. I’ll let it slip that Akira might be alive out there somewhere, eventually, and all this plannin’ will go right the drain. So… say I died too. Or that I got hurt bad, and I’m resting up somewhere.”

He looked out the window, straining for the cliff face that hid the garden from view. “Akira was willing to kill to keep that place a secret. I ain’t gonna be the one to ruin that, and—I dunno. Maybe it’ll be happy if it eats me up a day at a time instead of him. It ain’t some normal garden, and it already got a taste.”

He patted his arm. Everyone stared as he grinned, trying to play it off.

“Ryuji,” Ann said.

“You can’t possibly…” Yusuke said, but trailed off.

“But it could work,” Makoto muttered, already making plans.

“No!” Haru protested. “That’s unacceptable! Your mother, what will she think? How heartbroken will she be when she learns the truth?”

Ryuji paused, licked his lips, said, “Well, then—maybe I can go back for a few days. Get the doc to see me. Talk to Ma, explain why I gotta leave. She’ll understand. N’ maybe she’ll follow after me someday.”

Haru shook her head. Maybe Mrs. Sakamoto could leave the Ark due to bereavement, but— “Shido will think it’s suspicious, losing so many people so quickly. You—you can’t. You absolutely can’t.”

“You can’t do it,” Ryuji said, gritting his teeth as he leaned forward to look her in the eye. “Your dad, what’ll _he_ think, huh? What’ll happen to everybody that relies on him once his deal with the Ark falls through? You _can’t_.”

But she wanted to. She wanted to so badly—it was a beautiful garden, and it was sequestered from the world so artfully, and the farmhouse was so quaint—but he was right. She couldn’t.

It hurt, to have it laid bare so easily, but it was true. She couldn’t.

“You can come by and help out,” Ryuji said. “I ain’t gonna say no to that. But you can’t leave the Ark. Not ‘til Shido’s outta power—and if Akira’s out there, trying to give everybody a fighting chance against the Ark, then he might not stay there for long. After that, who knows? Maybe we won’t need gardens like this one anymore.”

Futaba, who had sidled up to his side of the couch while the argument was going on, rested her head on his knee. Ryuji patted her hair, a rust-red with her dark roots showing.

“It could work,” Makoto said.

“But—but it’s not fair!” Ann exclaimed, jumping to her feet.

“It could work,” Makoto repeated. “And—we don’t understand how the garden works. It could be Elw magic”—Yusuke scoffed—“or it could be some magic all its own. It’s an old garden; I’d dare to say it’s ancient.”

She paused for a moment, thinking it over, then said, “There was Nectar growing in there. Those peach-like trees, way in the back. No one has seen those since—since before the assassination. That’s at least five hundred years. Who knows if—if we’ll be drawn back here at all, and what for.”

Futaba muttered, “Wasn’t this a movie?”

Makoto ignored her. “My point is, if there _is_ some kind of magic in play attempting to root Ryuji to the spot—if we take him back to the Ark for treatment, and he gets, say, restless, moreso than usual—then we’ll know something. We can work from there.”

“But,” Ann protested, though it was weak. She had nothing to add, protesting simply for the sake of it.

Then Yusuke said, “I’ll stay as well.”

“The hell you will!” Ryuji’s protest was vehement, lined with fire—and quickly cut short by the pain in his shoulder. Futaba squealed and ducked as his knee swung and almost hit her in the face—she retreated to the bookcase, hugging her knees. “Shit, sorry.”

“I’m—I’m fine,” she said. Haru doubted it.

Yusuke turned the book around to show them its pages—stylized gods and goddesses at a banquet of some kind, garlands of flowers wrapped around the page. “When I was just a boy, I overheard some stories from this book,” Yusuke said. “A few months ago, I expressed an interest in it again. Akira and I went to the owner, only to find out it had been sold for dowry to a Drifter. But Akira found it for me, and now I discover it here.”

“That’s the one he said was on loan, right?” Makoto asked, brushing her fingers over the pages. Then her eyes widened. “Or—all of them were, from here?”

She scanned the bookshelves. Futaba twisted her head and looked them over, too.

Haru said, “You think one of these might have the answers, Yusuke?”

“One of them may have the start,” Yusuke said. He took a deep gulp of air. “Or it may be hidden somewhere the boy wouldn’t think to look. In his mother’s room, perhaps. I could look for it, search for answers—but not if I have to travel as the Ark pleases. One book every few weeks or so is far too slow a pace for my liking.”

He shifted. Ann protested, weakly, almost like she was doing it because she was the only one who would: “But…”

Yusuke stared at her, then at each of them in turn, even Futaba by the bookcase. “My loyalty lies with Akira,” he declared. “Not with the Ark nor with Shido. I will miss the food, but the garden will provide. And if Ryuji truly does feel the need to return here and his mother cannot follow, at least he won’t be alone.”

“But _you’ll_ be alone!” Ann cried, seizing the chance to grasp onto anything to protest.

“I was alone often enough even with Madarame around,” Yusuke said, “that this will be no different. At least now I will be better than a pack mule, going wherever my master pleases. Even if you say no, I’ll return here. I’ll do it as often as I need to for you to understand.”

Ann sank back into her chair, beginning to cry again. Haru knew the feeling: their team was breaking apart, and all because Akira was gone. Akira was the reason most of them were here, sitting in this room, but Haru had never thought that he was the only thing keeping them together.

Makoto patted her knee. “That’s fine,” she said to Yusuke. “Stay here. We can tell them you were hurt badly in the battle that took Akira—that you jumped in to save him, or to avenge him—but…”

“Take it, if you like,” Yusuke said, meaning the long-barreled sniper rifle of an ARM he’d been toting around. Shido and the Ark would want proof that he was dead or unwilling to return, and the ARM was the single most precious memento they could bring back, aside from his desert suit and mask.

Then Futaba said, “Mishima’s been learning to snipe,” and it all devolved from there. Haru’s head began to spin; there was too much information to go through, too many what-ifs to account for, and too many good-byes happening all at once.

Ryuji and Yusuke, choosing to protect the last green thing on the planet.

Akira and the boy. They hadn’t seemed like lovers, but they had run off together. Maybe Akira had been hoping and pining, for once, and been snubbed at every turn. Maybe he’d gone because the promise of the open sky and the empty desert called to him as strongly as keeping his love alive.

Haru squared her shoulders, fingers still pressed into the rag doll: a white tiger with faint gray stripes, the felt around his ears and paws styled to look like clouds, the stitching falling apart. Makoto occasionally rested her hand on Haru’s knee from time to time, as if to reassure herself that Haru was still there. Haru found herself gripping back more and more often as the conversation went on and they laid plans and counter-plans, discussed whether it would be better to lie to the doctors or not (the consensus was yes, except for Takemi and Maruki, who would see straight through them), and whether it would be safe for Ryuji to keep his ARM.

She focused on the room instead: how happy it looked to finally have lively people in it again, how they seemed to draw out the color in the old, chipping paint on the walls, how their laughter bounced off the boards. It was a good room in a good house. It certainly felt more alive than any room in the Ark’s sterile halls, barring Futaba’s, and she could see the ghost of visitors past: scruffy, wind- and sand-burned Drifters turning their collars down to take tea; the occasional Baskar in traditional clothing sitting stiff and awkward in the plush seats; a grinning sailor in his frayed suit chowing down on rare bread. Akira, in his desert suit, the frayed ends of it trailing and collecting dust on the floor; Akira, curling up in the seat under the window, book angled to catch the last of the dying sun’s light; Akira, happy and peaceful, chatting about anything and nothing with the one person he wanted more than anything to understand him.

Haru gripped the tiger doll and Makoto’s hand tighter. For Akira’s sake, they had to succeed. For Akira’s sake, they had to tell the biggest lie in Ark history. If they were found out, there was no telling how they’d be tried or what secrets would be lost with the garden.

They had to be brave.

For Akira’s sake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One day I really am going to go back through this mess and make it nice and coherent and a little less in your face with things, but for now I'll leave it as is. To the handful of people who stuck around for this disaster: thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> If you see anything that isn't tagged but should be, let me know.


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